


Emergency repairs and routine maintenance

by pushdragon



Series: Small Business 101 [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: AU, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Bucky Barnes Recovering (from a different kind of trauma), Bucky Barnes is fresh out of prison, Competence, Dom Steve Rogers, M/M, Pining, Service Top, Small Business 101, Steve Rogers is the softest dom, T'Challa owns a BDSM club
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-06
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-03 18:37:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 74,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24570157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pushdragon/pseuds/pushdragon
Summary: Bucky's come a long way since he got out of prison, damaged and mistrustful, with twelve years ripped out of his life. It's a constant struggle to get past his own defences and be the sort of human he wants to be. Luckily Steve's worth it.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: Small Business 101 [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1619494
Comments: 227
Kudos: 290





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story was finished for good. Then the world went crazy and it turns out my way of coping is to write two people overcoming challenges and basically being good to each other. Like the previous two parts, this is just shameless self-indulgence in the form of semi-connected scenes. It goes back in time a little, overlapping with Not What You'd Call Properly Submissive. The only difference is that I don't think I've actually included any kink in this update, and also it turns out that Steve's POV doesn't get a look in these days, now that Bucky has found his voice. (Sorry not sorry.)
> 
> Thanks so much to everyone whose encouragement and comments made this story such a happy place to come back to. I hope there might be more chapters to come, but iso has been all-round bad for my creativity so we'll have to see.

It's got to be three in the morning when Bucky gets home, sliding his key gingerly into the lock and jiggling it as quietly as he can. He slips off his shoes and leaves them inside the door so he can move soundlessly into the bedroom. If he's nicely buzzed from a long night and a new DJ with a merciless love of fast beats that challenged his stamina to the brink, when he sits on the side of the bed, his muscles tell him that he'll be paying for it tomorrow.

Despite his light-footed care, Steve rouses a little and rolls slightly back towards him, shifting as if he wants to wriggle out of grip of sleep. Bucky leans down to kiss his jaw, just under his ear. Steve breathes out long and deep, and goes still. By the time Bucky's got his jeans off and slipped under the covers, he's sunk back under again. 

That's fine, that's good. He can lie in the dark with Steve's back against his shoulder, pressed close enough to feel each breath. It's like lying inside a fortress, some nights, the breadth and mass of the man beside him. He's fucking solid, and, as Bucky's thoughts start to drift into sleepy abstraction, he thinks the solidity is a lot more than muscle. Or maybe it's all the one thing, like the shape of him has been moulded by his character, or the other way around. Steve is steadfast in everything he believes in, beyond fashion, beyond time. It doesn't take the hazy introspection on the cusp of sleep to make Bucky aware of this; it's the first thing about Steve he noticed, and fell for, and wasted all those months struggling not to lean on too heavily. 

In their home, in this room, in the shelter of Steve's body, Bucky feels safe. It muddles him up sometimes, this sensation he'd thought was lost forever along with his childhood. Some nights he mistrusts it as a complacent, weak feeling that gives him just one more thing to lose. But tonight is a good night. Tonight he feels immortal in the way that only dancing makes him feel. Tonight, he can let his past drift into his head without anguish or shame. He lets himself picture the cocky kid he used to be, mildly indulged and unquestionably loved, gleefully pushing boundaries in the full confidence that his young life was charmed. He can let himself remember the first months when prison crushed that spirit out of him, with sudden violence and then with creeping, constant dread, until all he felt was numb. He'd rebuilt himself into a more enduring shape, resilient, perpetually prepared. He stood on his own two feet and never accepted a favour without finding out the terms first. He learned to expect the worst and still be prepared for disappointment. He let go of the idea that anyone was on his side. 

He feels a burning sense of compassion for the bruised veteran who came out of maximum security, ready to break the neck of the first man who tried to jump him. He can see now that what he'd thought was wariness was tinged with paranoia, that he was too slow to trust and too accustomed to seeing the worst. The hair-trigger nerves he'd come out with could have landed him in too many kinds of trouble, if he hadn't found a job that offered him simple, achievable tasks and a quiet space to complete them in. Every time he stepped into this place, it felt like a sanctuary. He remembers how his heart rate used to pick up, on the bus, when they cleared the traffic crush around the interchange and closed in on the gas station and the end of his journey to work; how some days he ground his teeth with resentment at the ignominy of so badly needing a place that belonged to someone else; how the envy had slowly softened into gratitude. He hasn't forgotten the days he sat on the sofa, checking sub-folders for non-existent misfiling, while 6pm came and went and Steve quietly slipped into the bathroom to clean his teeth and spritz in the coconut spray that weighed his hair down sleek and neat. He remembers it as a separate thing from his reluctant attraction to Steve, the way he'd yearned for this apartment, the security he found within in, the clean surfaces and welcoming cushions and comfortable silence, with thick doors and double brick walls shutting out the whole world. 

Well, there's no separation now. It's all one sense of comfort, as his body sinks further under. Right now, he's tired to the bone, all the tension flushed out of him by sweat and his nerves numb from the receded flood of dance floor adrenalin. His limbs are stiffening already, in a reminder that he turned 35 not so long ago and there are parts of him that are on a downhill slope from peak fitness. He likes his body as it is now. The dense muscle he brought out of prison has been limbered up by nights of dancing and the light workout of pouring drinks. His strength is freer now, but still there if he needed to call on it.

It all blurs into a calm sense of invincibility. Tonight, he can do anything. He thinks he can almost … He rubs the back of his hand over Steve's side, and flicks the elastic of his underpants, until he wakes just enough to grunt and roll over, nestling his forehead against Bucky's shoulder. But like always, there's that careful sliver of space between them that Steve has schooled body not to trespass into without permission, even in the depths of slumber. Bucky reaches for his hand and draws Steve's arm across his chest, and the whole hot weight of him follows, snuggling clumsily up to Bucky's side. 

And that's it, that's just what he needed. That's perfect. Bucky's heart beats fast for a moment, that old spark of panic deep in his nerves underlying an intense flare of emotion he has no way to let out. He feels the throb of it in his jugular, in his skull, then it fades. He follows the ebb flow of it down, and sleeps.

**

"You look like you had a good night," Steve observes in the morning, sounding inhumanly chirpy in the grey light with his gym bag over his shoulder. "Didn't miss me too much?"

"Didn't miss you at all." Deeply rested, tingling with warmth down to the tips of his fingernails, Bucky stretches out the stiffness in his back and slips his hands behind his head. "Too busy shredding that dance floor. Nice to come home to a warm bed though."

"Hmmm. Think you'll still be in it by the time my session's done?"

"Well," Bucky says, softly insinuating. "I guess that depends on how quick you come back."

He's back so quickly there'll probably be some speeding fines in the mail, his skin still hot and salty and slick under Bucky's mouth, the roots of his hair damp against Bucky's fingers.

**

Just looking at the IRS letterhead triggers Bucky's stress reflexes. Couple that with the logo of the Department of Corrections website and it's a testament to the level of fear he feels for the consequences of not making this call that he manages to key in the phone number at all. 

The first syllable of voice gives him a spike of nerves, but it's only another recording. He listens through the tree of options that don't match his problem and picks the one most likely to lead to a live human. It doesn't. He hangs up, wipes his palms on his jeans, reaches out for the lukewarm cup of peppermint tea, and takes slow, measured sips from it. He tries again.

The third time he hears that former inmates and their representatives should refer to the contact details on the correctional services website, he has to take a deep breath to keep from hurling his phone across the room. Do they think he'd be calling if he hadn't already used every other contact route he could track down? He's sent enough unanswered emails he can practically recite the automated reply message by heart. 

Each time, he steels himself to take the right tone, unswervingly deferential, not to lose his temper like he did with the IRS line last week. Each time, it's wasted on an automated message and all that suppressed frustration comes out in a choked breath.

Eventually, he gets a hit from delivery and supplies, a man who sounds young, curt but not unfriendly. 

"Uh, hi," Bucky tells him, playing dumb with his heart suddenly in his mouth. "Is that Records?"

"Deliveries. I'll put you back to admin."

It's lucky Bucky has rehearsed the next bit and written down the most concise iteration of it that he can, because just hearing the inflectionless tone reciting the name of the institution that took twelve years of his life brings an ugly sweat up under his hair, under his clothes. 

"Barnes," he answers the woman's question reflexively, throat closing in on the name he doesn't let anyone use around him anymore. "James Buchanan Barnes."

The line goes dead for a while, and when it comes back it's a new speaker and a whole new tone.

"There's a form for records enquiries on the website."

It's more than robotic disinterest. There's resentment, even contempt, at the double offence of a prisoner having the nerve to ask for something, compounded by using the wrong channel to ask it. 

"I know. It's just a date correction," Bucky says quickly, before the speaker can sign off the way his tone threatens. "All I need is the right date for the--"

"Official records are sent to the home address within two weeks of release."

This guy's in admin – he's not a guard who ever knew Bucky, he's got no reason for the belittlement in his voice, except knowing he's talking to a former inmate. Bucky's stomach gets queasy with it, that dehumanising tone that he thought he'd left behind him, along with the hair-trigger nerves and the fear. 

He folds his free arm over his belly and closes his eyes. "Yeah, I know. Thank you. But the error's in old records, back before that. My second sentence was backdated to include time served, but it wasn't entered right in the system. It got corrected a couple of years ago. The update never pushed through to the Federal database though." 

"They release you or didn't they? Jeez, just be happy they let you outta this place."

"I know," Bucky says like a mantra. "I know. It's just a date. But it's a big deal for the IRS."

It's a big deal for James Buchanan Barnes, some pretty blunt wording in that letter mentions, since the first four months of wages he earned working at the club is currently being assessed as prison income solely because a database error insists that he was still in state custody when he earned it. There are serious penalties, that same letter notes, for fraudulent claims for tax credits and other entitlements. 

"Well you tell the IRS they can give us a call any time they like. You let them know that." 

"They said it's my--"

The line has gone dead. Bucky puts his head in his hands for a bit, then tries again, but this time Deliveries isn't picking up at all. 

He lets himself fall back on the sofa and stare at the ceiling, and he's still there when Steve comes back. 

"Hard day then?" Steve asks lightly, as he swings a canvas bag of groceries up onto the sink and starts putting them away.

The irrepressible energy of him is like a deliberate insult, in the face of how diminished Bucky feels right now. Every time, it's like that bureaucracy strips away everything Bucky has accomplished over the last year, and crushes him back into the damaged, jumpy half-person he was when they let him out. 

"Yeah, it was, as a matter of fact," Bucky tells him, snippy. "I called the prison about that tax credit letter."

"How'd that go?" Steve asks brightly.

"Exactly like I said. They couldn't give less of a fuck."

"Try someone higher up. There's gotta be someone who'll do the right thing."

Bucky's lungs clench too tight to give that the crushing reply it deserves. To Steve, this is just a matter of persistence, like getting a refund on a misdelivered online order. He hasn't seen it from the other side, doesn't know what a streamroller the justice system is, a machine built to pulverise any notion of understanding or compassion. Steve's indefatigable sense of fairness makes him deaf to what Bucky has explained to him over and over. Being right doesn't make a lick of difference. There is no complaints department in prison. There is no independent arbiter, no right of appeal. There is just power, and bureaucracy, and knowing when you're wasting your fucking time. 

"You want me to try?" Steve asks. 

That's even worse because Steve has a sense of self-worth that would have withstood the worst the corrections system could throw at him. Bucky doesn't need the reminder that he'll never understand how Bucky let it grind him down. And he doesn't get, either, how close to the surface it still is in Bucky, the total inertia of surrendering to the system, of giving up, how hard he has to work some days not to be that person anymore. Fuck, his heart's beating fast. 

"What's that?"

Steve looks at the packet of grated parmesan in his hand and shrugs. "We weren't eating the fancy kind fast enough. I had to throw out the last block, and that stuff's not cheap."

Like he doesn't even know how it's little luxuries like those that make all the difference between living like a free man and being kept like livestock on minimal nutrition; like he doesn't realise that whether Bucky eats it is not the fucking point. When he stands up and snatches it from Steve's hand, the contents looks like sawdust. 

"You won't taste the difference," Steve says, and hooks his finger in Bucky's belt to tug him close and kiss him.

Bucky pushes away hard, shoving his fists under his arms as if that could defuse the jolt of violent rage that runs through him. He could hit Steve in his smug, stupid mouth, hit him and not stop when he drew blood. He feels sick with the urge to pound today's humiliation and anger into Steve's head with his bare hands, if that's the only way to make him understand.

Reaching for him, Steve takes one look at his face and drops his hand again. "Buck," he says, sounding wounded, pleading. "Come here. Let me-"

"No," Bucky grinds out, digging his nails into his palm, crumpling the plastic packet in the other. "Get off me."

In a few steps, he's at the door, then he's through it and pulling it shut behind him, sealing Steve inside, away from danger. 

It takes a few minutes to get all the swearing out of his system, and a few more for his heart to stop racing. There's a grating wind blowing, whipping leaves and the occasional scrap down the gutters, fingering its way under his clothes. 

It can't be more than half an hour later his pocket buzzes with a text. _Come back soon?_ and a picture of an open beer bottle. 

_Can't,_ Bucky replies, and lets it sit for a while. He lowers himself down onto the top step and takes a photo of the street, texts that without comment. It's not just that he didn't bring keys. The longer he spends out here, watching the last light drain out of the sky, the more disconnected he feels from the safe, warm life waiting back inside. And that in turn makes him angrier, with himself, with Steve, with himself for being angry with Steve for so little reason, with Steve for putting up with it all and never giving him anything to push back against. 

It must be ten minutes after that he hears the door open softly behind him. Steve sits down on the opposite side of the stairs and puts a beer down between them. Bucky bends his head onto his knees and doesn't take it yet. His bones are angry, his muscles, he's angry right down to the blood. It's feral, not an intellectual anger that he can question or control. It doesn't want to be comforted.

Steve's quiet beside him, but Bucky can feel the concern radiating off him. His calling in life is to offer comfort, save people from their problems, but some days solace is the last thing Bucky needs or deserves. He tries so hard, for Steve. But days like this he just needs to put himself first and stop pretending to have it under control.

"Thought I might bring back burgers for dinner," Steve says after a while, quietly, picking up Bucky's beer and drinking from it. "How does that sound?" 

Bucky can't even muster the energy to shrug. 

"I'll get you the one with the peppers you like," Steve goes on.

He sets down the beer and stands up. At the foot of the stairs, he stops and looks down at Bucky for a while. Bucky can see the well-fastened laces of his shoes, feel the stifled frustration. 

"Sweet potato fries?" he asks, perfectly straight, and Bucky lets out a helpless snort of objection.

"Don't you fucking dare," Bucky says to the pavement, but he's fighting a smile as he does it. 

"Okey-doke," Steve says, brighter. "You got it. Don't go anywhere."

The charred smell of honest, old fashioned burgers is so familiar it lifts his spirits in a breath. Fuck, he missed that when he was inside. Hot fat and carbon from the grill, the tang of freshly sliced tomato, and the gooey sweetness of onions. They take them inside to eat, in silence, until Steve powers up the projector and puts on a movie that turns out to be about a fur trader who gets mauled and left for dead in the Canadian winter, only to limp out of the snowfields to wreak the sort of revenge that puts anyone else's problems into perspective.

He's impossible. Bucky wants to lash out, but there's no point, because Steve will take the bitter tone and the grumpy barbs, and if Bucky says something really hurtful, he'll say _Hey, come on, man_ with that heartfelt line of weariness tightening between his brows. And he'll make room for Bucky to vent his frustrations. He's resilient enough to bear anything that Bucky throws at him, buttressed by a dubiously founded faith that on the other side of it is reconciliation. He's impossible, and he's just exactly what Bucky needs. 

"I'm gonna sleep here," Bucky says afterwards, tucking the scrunched serviettes and wrappings back into the paper bag. "Not really fit for company today."

He knows what the silence that follows is. It's Steve biting back objection after objection, until he can make himself say, "If you say so." 

Bucky rolls over, turning his back, to cut the thread of expectation between them. 

A few minutes later, Steve's back. He leans over to drape another blanket and one of his sweaters over the back of the sofa. "You'll get cold out here."

It's not lost on Bucky that he's wearing a sleek pair of navy blue briefs that looks fresh out of the packet, and nothing else. "Well," he says, trying not to smile too fondly at the obvious optimism of it. "That should be enough to keep me warm."

He gets up early the next day, a few minutes after Steve leaves for the gym. There'll be clients today, so he deals with the light accumulation of cups in the sink, and tidies away discarded shoes and puts up the blinds to let the sun in. 

At eight o'clock, he calls the prison line again, and gets lucky. The woman who picks up sounds busy, too busy to argue. Perhaps she picked up someone else's phone since she doesn't seem to have the usual obstructionist excuses on the tip of her tongue. With a sigh, she says she'll email a corrected record direct to the IRS, and dutifully writes his case details down, checks them twice.

He hangs up the phone feeling empty. Less than five minutes, that took, and he didn't even have to raise his voice. The emotional battery of the last day was utterly unnecessary. And yet it won't be the last time he has to get through it, most likely. 

He calls a ride. 

Steve is finishing up with a set of hand weights when he reaches the gym. 

"Hey, Buck," he says, like any other day, like yesterday's meltdown didn't happen. "You gonna take a class at last?"

He pulls a towel off the bench and slings it round his glistening neck.

"It seemed like a really good day to beat the shit out of something."

He faces off against a punching bag first, trying to lose himself in the rhythm – right, right, left – to obscure the nauseous feeling he gets from sinking his fists in, the familiar/unwelcome shock of impact in his bones. He's glad when Sam comes by. 

"You want to try a moving target? I think you got that one licked." 

Sam's as quick on his feet as last time, leaning effortlessly just out of range, dodging with uncanny foresight until Bucky, tiring, falls back without thinking on an old trick. He feints left with a little stagger, as if that last blow had unbalanced him, and, while Sam's following that trajectory from the corner of his eye, sticks him with a right uppercut. 

It works better than he expected. The blow connects jarringly with Sam's jaw. The next two heartbeats don’t come. And then Sam is jerking his head clear, giving a grin around his mouthguard, tapping his gloves together.

"That's more like it. You got more where that came from?"

Bucky lands a few more blows on him, once he sees that Sam can take it, but the real pleasure of it is the adrenalin, the drowning out of emotion, and the sheer permission of letting his animal reflexes run his mind completely. 

"You were going easy on me with that left hook," Sam says as they're cleaning up after. 

"Was I?' Bucky deflects, as if he'd never noticed how the pain pretty much prevents him raising his left arm above shoulder height. "You ready to go?"

Steve picks up the shopping bag he'd just rested on the bench, looking surprised. "Sure."

Sam says, "That's how you want to play this?"

It's not something Bucky ever talks about, since the injury came from that first warning from Vaccaro, that he'd fought in a mad panic when it turned out he may as well have yielded. But Sam's got a trick for pitching a challenge as friendly teasing that's impossible to shut down without looking like an asshole. 

"Got an injury. Going on twelve years ago now. Talking about it doesn't do it any good."

"Don't you spend all day lifting boxes though?" 

"Not just that," Bucky objects. 

"Quite a bit of that," Steve adds, laying down his shopping with a frown. "And it's scaffolding when it's not boxes."

"Mind if I take a look at it?" 

Bucky's got his jacket in his hand. He could put it on and leave. But Steve is standing with his arms folded, wearing that stony look he gets when he wants something he thinks is too selfish to ask for. 

Bucky sighs. "Go ahead. I'm telling you there's nothing to see."

Sam's hands are steady and light, one resting over the top of his shoulder joint, and the other above his elbow, slowly lifting his arm out onto the horizontal.

"Let me know when it hurts."

"That's not good."

Sam eases his arm down a little, then up onto a new angle until Bucky grimaces. 

"I'm no medical man, but it's usually the same thing with the shoulder. Torn rotator cuff most likely. You feel it, don't you?" 

Bucky shrugs. "Don't notice it." 

"Sure you don't. I'm going to give you the number for a physio on the other side of the city. Even this far down the track, there's exercises that can help with the scar tissue." 

He puts on his jacket while Sam texts him the number. There's no harm in that. But Steve lags behind afterwards, presumably receiving a pep talk about making sure Bucky books an appointment. Fortunately he's worn too much adrenalin out of himself to get worked up about it. He can see what would have attracted Steve to the gym routine, when he first came here, carrying the memories of that car crash. 

After the ride home, relaxed from engine vibrations and the familiar passivity of clinging to Steve's back, he curls up on the sofa to get a bit of work done, headphones in, while Steve hooks up his phone to the projector and watches highlights from the weekend's games. The slow morning feels normal. It feels like a life he belongs in again. 

"Sam recommended this," Steve says after lunch, and there's a waver of untruth in it that would be indiscernible on anyone less earnest. He's holding up a tube of ointment, pharmaceutical branding. "It ought to help with your shoulder." He's watching Bucky's reaction closely. "Do you want to do it yourself?"

He holds the tube out, and waits for Bucky to decide. 

"Bit hard to reach," Bucky tells him. "How about you do it?"

Steve's smile says he thinks that's a great idea, and that kicks off a pleasant quarter-hour of Steve's big hands gently rubbing liniment over the ball of Bucky's shoulder, first the injured one and then, when he asks, the good one that's not at risk of anything more than a little out-of-practice stiffness. It's pretty nice, after all that separation, both care and skin contact without any expectation about what happens next. When it's over, he draws in a deep breath and hears its echo in Steve behind him. There's a pause, and then Steve's forehead comes to rest against the back of his neck, followed by another one of those belly-deep breaths. Bucky leans back into it, just enough to say _me too._

An evening with three clients keeps them both busy. After it, Bucky lays out the cushions and a blanket on the sofa again.

"Still a bit – you know," he says with an apologetic shrug. "My shoulders feel great though."

It's the dead of night when he wakes up. The nerves in his tired limbs feel liquid, the jumpiness gone at last. But he knows what woke him. Like a sailor readjusting to land, the wrongness reached into his sleep. There should be movement beside him, breath and warmth he can reach out for. The distance between them is too great.

Steve's sleeping in the centre of the bed, arms stretched into the empty space. Bucky strips off the shirt and track pants he'd been sleeping in. "Hey buddy," he murmurs. "You wanna make some room for me too?" 

He doesn't wake as Bucky slides in beside him. Plunged into heat, Bucky feels the ache of cold in his feet, and shivers. Steve's arm tightens over his ribs, he presses in closer against Bucky's side. There's a painful jolt of regret in his chest to think of the two days of this that he lost, but Bucky's too tired to be angry about things he can't control. Steve's body is a pool of warmth and comfort, and he lets himself sink into it. 

**

Their position has barely shifted when he wakes up, except that the wall of heat down his side now envelops his back. His body is so relaxed he can barely feel it at all. He becomes aware of the solid arm draped over his waist, the tiny shifts that indicate, first, consciousness, then, more gradually, intention, as Steve's lips shift minutely against the back of his shoulder. When he cracks open his eyes, he sees early daylight. 

"It's Thursday," he mumbles, squeezing them shut again. Steve hums confirmation behind him. "Steve, it's Thursday. Why aren't you at the gym?"

"Skipped it," Steve tells him, in that velvet rumble of a voice he gets when he's perfectly relaxed. Bucky feels that tone in his dick, turning the general sense of contentment into something hungry.

He stretches just enough to meet the resistance of Steve's arm and chest. Steve never skips the gym. Sam jokes that he'll know the apocalypse has come the day Steve isn't walking through his door two minutes after opening with a spring in his step. 

"Why'd you do that?"

Those little brushes of contact have turned into a slow line of kisses climbing up Bucky's shoulder.

"I woke up with a hot man in my arms." He kisses the meat of Bucky's bicep. "Figured I'd rather get my workout right here." 

Oh Jesus. It's Thursday. There's no clients today. They're going to spend all morning in bed, and Steve's in one of those moods where his world has narrowed down to nothing but the two of them. The hunger in Bucky's body turns urgent. When he rolls back, he meets the unmistakable prod of arousal. 

"How long have you been holding onto that for?"

Steve grinds against him. "Just about long enough, I'd say."

He flattens his palm over Bucky's belly to pull them tighter against each other, and they go on like that for a delicious long time, Steve working himself harder against Bucky's ass, Bucky shoving his pants down and hooking his ankle behind Steve's so that Steve can get right up between his thighs, the hot, wet head of him nudging against Bucky's balls over and over, a deliberate rhythm, until he can't see straight. 

"Steve," he rasps out of his dry throat. "Steve."

He gets a couple of gentle fingers dipping into his mouth, then they close wet and tight over one nipple. He jerks electrically at the sudden spike of sensation and starts to push back rougher, messing up their rhythm and ending up with less instead of more, but still arching up into the intense pleasure-pain where Steve is pinching and tugging. 

"More-" he manages to groan as he flips over in one highly motivated move to put them face-to-face, so they can get their hands on each other at last. He treats Steve gently at first, dragging his fingertips up the silky length of his dick, one stroke after another to get him nice and wet. He loves the reflective pleasure of touching each other at the same time, how the eager swipe of his thumb over Steve's slit has its echo in the overwhelming throb of sensation he feels when Steve's fingers cinch under his cockhead and tug; how the urge to give pleasure gets so tangled up in the physical reality of feeling it. 

"Wait," he groans, and rolls back to grab the slick and squeeze it onto Steve's fingers. 

And – god – that's what he needed. Now Steve can use all the power in his hands, pulling tight and rough, the way Bucky needs. Sometimes it's easy, with him and Steve. Easy like he can't believe. 

Steve mouth opens, that tempting glisten of pink inside the bristle of his whiskers. He thinks of Steve's mouth while Steve's hand works him, tight and focused with that gentle flourish over the head, never missing the beat. He kind of wants to add kissing to the erotic mix, but the angle of elbows between them makes it hard, so he settles for watching Steve's face, his hooded eyes slipping closed as he gets closer to the edge, the frustration etching itself in lines between his brows. He's beautiful when Bucky makes him come, his breath gets so strangled, and his dark lashes flutter, and his face turns fractionally away like it's all too much to bear front-on. Everything stops still for a moment afterwards, while he lets Steve drift on the pleasure of it, and then it's a sprint to the finish with Steve's fist working him intently, Bucky's fingers wrapped over the straining muscle just beneath his elbow, until he gives it up too. 

There's something about the muscle-deep pleasure of a good sleep that heightens the sensation this morning. He feels washed clean by it, washed out. He could lie on his back in the firm embrace of the mattress all day, but Steve is starting to move beside him, cleaning up with whatever article of clothing he retrieved from the covers. An unwelcome memory slips into his head, of how it felt in prison, in the aftermath of sex. The end of that brief, blinding moment of forgetfulness, and after it, solitude too deep to name. He doesn't want either of them to get out of bed. 

There's a marker pen slipped behind the lamp on the bedside table. He tugs it out and passes it over. 

"Why don't you draw something?" he prompts, with a glance under his eyelashes that he hopes has the right note of challenge to tease out Steve's proprietorial streak that's been slow to wake this morning. "Keep yourself busy." 

When Steve registers the absence of paper, his face goes soft. "You'd like that?"

Hesitating, Bucky settles on his stomach and folds his arms under his chin. "Yeah. I would."

He spends the next hour dozing to the damp swish of the marker tip over his back and, later, down as far as his thighs. It doesn't matter what Steve's drawing. He's going to make do with a sponge bath and keep the design under his shirt all night. He'll find little ways to remind Steve of it while he's working behind the bar, so that when he comes home it's to one of those possessive moods that it's been too long since Bucky was on the receiving end of. 

**

Bucky has started to come in early for his club shifts, purely for the company. He likes the ease of the hours before opening, before the costumes of latex and studded leather and false eyelashes go on, when his friends are just lounging around in jeans and worn knits, casually messing with each other, grumbling about the traffic and wandering over to impugn his choice of music. 

The Black Widow pulls up a bar stool some weeks, with a loose hoodie covering her hair curlers, and slouches over a shot of premium vodka that Stark's budget will never miss. Sometimes she flicks quietly through her phone and lets him work, but days like this, when he's too busy calculating stock numbers to fend her off, her line of questioning gets cheerfully invasive. 

"I'm going to need you to turn the beats down when I'm on," she's telling him, ostensibly scrolling through one of her oversubscribed socials. "I'm using the stingers tonight. That zap is half the fun – so I don't want anyone to miss it." She lowers her phone very slightly. "Have you done any electro play? With Steve?"

Somehow she keeps the question off-handed, so it feels overly defensive not to answer.

"Never been interested," he tells her, popping out the head of his x-acto knife and slicing the tape on the next carton of stock, maybe a touch fiercer than he needs to.

Those cider bottles make a satisfying clink as he slides them into the fridge. All too often, these conversations seem to come back to him and Steve, and what drew them together, like there's some secret in that apart from sheer luck followed by endless hard work. 

"What about blades?"

The thought makes him shudder. After all those years when improvised cutting weapons were a matter of life and death, he can't imagine ever wanting to bring them into the bedroom. 

"Nope."

She leans forward, voice dropping to a murmur. "He's given you a collar though."

This time he meets her gaze firmly. "Of course."

Her eyes sparkle at that, delighted. 

"Is he being gentle with you?" she asks, so sweetly, so knowingly, and suddenly so close to the bone that Bucky can feel the colour flooding into his face. 

"Jesus, Nat," he scowls, looking around for the next task to distract himself with. 

And that, he realises in a flash of insight as he cuts the empty box free of tape and folds it, is exactly what she's been trying to puzzle out. How someone even more defensive and closed-off than she is could have opened up enough to forge a connection with someone who wears his heart on his sleeve the way Steve does.

"Oh," she says, leaning back. "Did I cross a line there? You can't expect me to recognise acceptable conversation topics in my line of work. I had a client once who wanted to be immersed in a tank of live shrimp wearing nothing but handcuffs and a breathing tube. There's no such thing as normal."

"And how did that go?" Bucky asks as casually as he can, taking the switch in his stride.

"Never happened. He was a big shot investment banker who'd married into a political family. Refused to put that kind of payment on his credit card. Cash only. So I turned him down."

"What have you got against cash?" 

"Where do you want me to start?" she says, returning her attention to her phone. "There's the clients who want a last minute discount, or decide they don't want to pay at all. The ones who want a little extra before they had over that wad of bills. You don't want to argue with a man who's just found out he really hates being tied up and pushed around and doesn't have anyone else to take it out on."

Bucky thinks of how Steve is with his clients afterwards, curled up on the sofa, talking softly. How different would those moments feel if Steve had to be on his guard every time against clients expecting more than what they'd paid for? The softness that he's made his trademark would be warped into something much steelier, a wary distance that he thinks he recognises.

It slots into place, then, the reasons behind the weird pull he'd sensed between Natasha and Steve. It hadn't occurred to him how different her world is from his and Steve's, how every appointment is threaded with danger, how much more resilience she has to call on to do the same things he does. Steve thinks of Natasha as a kindred spirit, a curvy, lipsticked version of himself. Her feelings for him must be infinitely more complicated. She must think of him with envy, and he still doesn't know whether she wants him, or just longs for the trust and comfort he takes from his work. 

"How long have you known Natasha?" he asks a couple of mornings later, when Steve's leaning back from a stack of hotcakes that very nearly defeated him.

Steve shrugs out of his carbohydrate induced stupor. "A few years. She was a big deal at the club before I got introduced. It took a while to get to know her. She's - you know. All business." He swipes up the last trace of syrup with his finger and puts it in his mouth. "Why?" 

"Seems like her clients are harder work than yours. I guess I wondered how that works."

Steve wipes his mouth and crushes the paper napkin into his coffee cup. "She knows how to handle them."

One by one, Bucky picks the last of the blueberries off his plate, taking his time.

"Can't be easy. Some of the weights you lift are almost as heavy as she is. And you remember what it was like to have a client who left you rattled."

It takes Steve a moment to register the reference to Stuart, who'd left him so deeply distressed that it had taken weeks of experimenting for Bucky to figure out the right combination of comfort and quiet space to ease him down. Then his face hardens, the way it always does when he thinks his competence is being questioned. "And I handled that too. It's part of the job."

Bucky nods, waiting for his defensiveness to diffuse. "Okay then," he says evenly, waving over the server for the bill. "All right."

At the other end of the day, Steve comes into the bathroom when he's brushing his teeth and leans against the door jamb.

"Are you worried about her?" he asks. "Is that what this is?"

Bucky bends over the sink to spit, as if that could hide the helpless, tender affection on his face. Because no matter how definite he is when it comes to his principles, the door is never quite closed with Steve. He turns things over in his head long after a conversation's done. He listens, or at least he listens to Bucky.

"Yeah," Bucky says, grinning despite himself as he rinses his brush off. "A bit."

"You want to run her bookings or something? Like you do for me? I know you've already got a plan." 

"I was thinking maybe she could bring her new clients here, before she gets to know them. Use the office on your days off. Be a hell of a lot safer with you or me waiting on the other side of the door."

When Bucky glances at him in the mirror, he's thinking hard, his brow all crumpled up with tension. "All right," he says after a while. "Let's see what she thinks about that."

The tone of it's a little off. Nothing that can't be fixed with a lingering, mint-fresh kiss up against the bathroom wall. But when he's finished rinsing his mouth out, he finds Steve's gone to bed. 

**

Bucky's having one of those mornings where his life seems to sparkle with infinite little luxuries. 

Last night he had another one of those dreams – not the violent nightmare type, but the slow, crushing helplessness of interminable bureaucracy. The type where he wakes up back in a cell and spends weary hours trying to find someone who can tell him what he did to get put back in here, and how long before he can get out, and why the phones have been ripped out, and where he can find the post box to send a letter to Steve. 

In the aftermath of those dreams, the small freedoms of the everyday take on a poignancy beyond words. The low gleam of sunrise in his face as he jogs down the front stairs into the crisp morning, it's lovelier than it has any right to be. The swish and crunch of his steps on the pavement, the ligaments stretching and the thrum of blood in his veins as he works up to full stride. The coincidence of having the right change in his pocket at the hardware store. And the absolute satisfaction of closing the door behind him and sealing him back into their home.

Steve's in the shower when he gets back, but he's still got his Sinatra collection playing nice and loud. It's impossible not to hum along to the familiar chorus as Bucky pulls the drill off its charger and counts out the screws by the kitchen sink. 

The song changes as he lines up the new hanging rack with yesterday's pencil marks so it sits just under the shelf. He swipes a screw onto the magnetised head and drills it in place, distractedly singing along. _So deep in my heart, you're really a part of me._ That's another one of the day's small joys, the freedom to shape his environment in little ways that make it better. Steve's going to love the convenience of having tools to hand when he cooks. 

There's eight screws in all, and when they're done he goes back and tightens them until he's satisfied, then he fishes the hooks out of his shopping bag and puts them in place. _Just the thought of you, makes me stop before I begin._ It's an easy song for his vocal range, and he skims up to the higher notes clear and easy. _I'd sacrifice anything, come what might, for the sake of having you near._

The ladle from the drying rack looks just like it should when he hangs it.

"You sound like you mean that," Steve says behind him, and flicks him with the damp corner of his towel as he passes, as if that could obscure the tightness in his voice. 

Bucky stands with the colander in his hand for a little while, and can't quite pin down the right way to respond to that. It's a lot later, when he's putting the office in order for Steve's clients, before he comes back to it. 

If he doesn't put it in words so often – if neither of them puts it in words, to be honest, ever – it's not because he doesn't think about it. But the way he feels about Steve isn't some neat little song title sentiment. Sometimes he picks up one of Steve's discarded jackets to hang on the coat rack, the expensive smell of leather mingled with clean soap and cologne, and feels a piercing sense of belonging. Other times, it's his animal body that responds greedily to the sight of Steve's muscled forearms or a suddenly bared strip of stomach when he pulls off his sweater. Or it manifests as a sweet ache in his chest when Steve flops down on the sofa beside him, last client gone for the day, and rests his head on Bucky's shoulder. It's all the one thing, whether it's close to the surface and too intense to put in words, or a constant background hum as steady as a heartbeat. 

He finds Steve sitting on the side of the bed, smoothing out a slightly rumpled t-shirt over his thigh. 

"I did mean it," he says, too quick for second thoughts. "I do. You know that, don't you?"

Steve's hands go still, forgetting their task. "Yeah?"

His face is soft and flushing. He talks about his parents a little more these days – especially his mother. Bucky wonders if he's had anyone, over the last fifteen years, since he lost her, to tell him he's loved. He thinks about his own parents, how he'd known without having to hear it that they loved him, but still wasted all those years doubting the ability of that love to withstand the mistakes he'd made. Steve's given him so much. If there's one small thing he can do to balance that out, he's grateful for it. 

He settles himself over Steve's thighs and touches his cheek. "I do," he says. "Love you. Even when I'm not saying it, it's still true." He gently turns Steve's face back to him. "It's embarrassing how far gone I am over you."

His face is still turned down, so Bucky kisses his eyebrow, his forehead. "Steve?"

And then Steve's pulling him close, burying his face in Bucky's neck. "Me too," he says, wheezy like his breath's all gone. "God, Buck, me too."

They have three hours left before the night's first appointment, but somehow they're still wrapped up in each other when the buzzer rings. That rumpled t-shirt isn't quite enough to hide the mouth marks all over Steve's neck and chest and his hair is wild from the grip of Bucky's fingers. He's a total disgrace compared to his usual professional standards, but he's still doing better than Bucky, who doesn't even bother to get out of bed until he's lured away with coffee and a steaming hot shower around the middle of the following morning.

And you can't even dance to Sinatra, not really.

**


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The writer has clearly paid attention to Steve's obvious virtues, noting his trademark earnestness, the softly-spoken doggedness that takes a little longer to spot, as well as his indisputable commitment to his gym routine. Then the encounter takes an unexpected turn. 
> 
> "When I ask Rogers whether his busy booking schedule has left him with time to find a partner, for the first time his openness falters. That's off-limits, he tells me, with a softness that sounds a lot like yes. I tell him that, if he does, they must be the best kept submissive in the country. Off limits, he repeats, this time in the authoritative voice I heard on stage that morning."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a lot of shameless fluff in here. I feel like I should be apologising for it, like it's not real story because no one's heart is aching. But I've got a lot of satisfaction out of writing it, and if any of you take some pleasure in reading it, then what is there to regret? 
> 
> You know what to expect here. More of the same, except Bucky eventually takes another step further into the world of kink.

When he was still young, there had been that whole glorious year of sitting in bars with a group of friends, splitting a jug of beer and a single packet of chips, lounging back in the knowledge that no one could stop them because every sip was one hundred percent legal at last. And then that stroke of shitty luck had brought it all to an end for him. If he'd thought then that being able to drink all afternoon was the ultimate display of freedom, well, these days he's got a much longer list of all the tiny gestures that he finds freedom in. Bucky pours himself a seltzer water and drops in lime and ice, cold as a winter morning when he puts it to his mouth, and reminds himself not to take one drop of it for granted. 

This is the kind of thing he thinks of sometimes, during quiet moments in his shifts behind the bar, when drunken crowd noise and low lights make a bridge between his present and past selves. With Val commanding the main stage and magnetising the Thursday night crowd with her form-fitting leather and fearless presence, this room is left mostly empty, except for a group by the door, and a couple of friends of T'Challa's who come in for the cocktails more than the action.

And the customer pulling out his wallet and leaning on the bar. 

"Hey, man. Can I get a martini thanks."

Bucky puts his seltzer water away. "Sure. Gin or vodka?"

"I like it both ways. What do you recommend?"

He holds Bucky's gaze in a way that may or may not be flirtatious, then glances away and smiles. 

"Vodka takes the cold better." 

As he turns around for the bottles, Bucky thinks it's the hair. There's something about the new cut, the wave of it flowing back from his forehead, that comes across as approachable, even flirty. The moment he had the length cut off, he noticed the difference, from women especially, but also, it seems, from men. Though it doesn't look better or worse, it sure leaves his face looking open, and the effort he has to put into styling it maybe makes him seem like a man on the lookout for attention.

He keeps a lid on the flashy bar tricks as he turns back around, shaker in hand. The customer is leaning his elbows on the bar, slumped in a way that highlights his long, slender arms and youthful flexibility. 

"You sure know what you're doing with your hands." 

He's tall, maybe taller than Steve, but with a narrow, bony face and a reticent look that's only banished by his smile, which is frequent and sweet. His slumped posture allows him to glance up through his eyelashes in a way that makes Bucky think _natural born submissive._

He gets a lot of that. It's the muscle, and maybe his love of black, and the gruff, don’t-mess-with-me expression he had all those years of practice to perfect. With no more information than the way he looks and the place he works in, strangers take him for a dom. Seems like it was only Steve who had the intuition to glimpse the capacity for submission in Bucky, which they've barely even started to explore. 

"Sorry," the customer says out of nowhere. "I bet you get that all the time."

Bucky gives him a tight smile. Because he would be the sort of humble, low-key submissive who doesn't want to make it all about himself. Earnest in a way that reminds him of Steve. A temptation that he does not need. The guy's young, maybe mid-twenties, and there's something attractive about that, the undaunted natural optimism, the potential still in him, all that life yet to come. There's part of Bucky that yearns to be recharged out of that youthful resilience, and he could do it, too. He's learned the whole dom phrasebook over his months working with Steve, enough to fake it for one night if the guy is willing to cut him some slack. 

But over the guy's shoulder is the stairwell where he sees Steve lingering some nights, the green light from the exit sign highlighting the troubled lines on his brow with hard shadows. Steve isn't possessive, exactly. But he remembers from that session with the Widow how deeply he underestimates his hold on Bucky.

As the weeks go by, and time wears down his hesitations, as it gets harder to deny the permanence of this thing with Steve, he's thought a few times that he could have done with more time to play the field. A chance to indulge all those long-denied jailhouse fantasies. But life didn't give him that chance, and he's had too much experience with misfortune to let good things pass him by now. He's growing his hair back how it was. He misses the length of it. He misses Steve's hands in the length of it, and the way Steve looks at him when it's freshly brushed and loose. The way Steve watches him when he's tying it back.

He searches in the back of his wallet, pulls out the card with the navy blue disc logo and two words printed in unassuming sans serif. 

"You want a guy who'll take good care of you? Get in touch with him." The young man looks glum for a moment, but when Bucky puts the glass down in front of him and gives him a smile with a twist of mischief in it, he lights up a little. "You won't regret it."

The rest of the shift goes slow, but at last he's on his way to the bus station, thinking how he'll tell Steve he's going to start charging a finder's fee for new customers like this one. He might never be completely reconciled to Steve's job, he thinks as the bus pulls out, but at least it no longer seems like a revolving door bound to usher in his replacement. It will always be a vulnerability, Steve's fundamental need to do good, that draws him to the damage in people. But some things have changed since those fights it used to cause between them. He's had enough time to see how the intimacy Steve creates with his clients is a gift of generosity, but what he has with Bucky has a lot of take in it as well. He needs what Bucky gives him, and he wants to need it, as if opening up that vulnerability somehow balances out all the cares he takes from his clients' shoulders. 

As he pulls out his keys, he thinks he can hear laughter, and when he opens the apartment door it's to the unexpected sight of the Black Widow draped over the far end of the sofa, with her calves resting on the back of it. There's a half-empty vodka bottle on the floor in between her and Steve, and, Bucky's gratified to note, a healthy distance.

Steve looks at him the way Steve often looks at him – like he's been gone for weeks instead of hours – and that's a dilemma he's not prepared for. Most of their work colleagues don't officially even know he and Steve are together, though the dance crew are onto it, and once or twice he's caught a knowing glint in T'Challa's eye. Natasha knows, but it's not like she's had much chance to observe it up close before. His instincts tell him to tread carefully. But his heart tells him his caution's going to put doubts in Steve's head that he's got no need to be having. 

He pours himself a measure from the vodka bottle and, since Natasha's lying over half the sofa, sits on the floor, leaning back adjacent to Steve's knee. He feels Steve's fingers skate through his hair, down the side of his neck, tucking into his collar for a moment just to say hi. Oh, fuck it all. He leans into it, glad to be home.

"We were talking about your idea," Steve says. "For sharing the office."

"Yeah?"

Natasha laughs, an eager sound that's not at all how she does it when she's in character. "I don’t need to borrow your dungeon."

Bucky asks, "Oh? How come?"

"She kind of demonstrated that," Steve tells him, rubbing one hand of over his knee while the other guards his solar plexus. 

She turns her head to smile at them. "I've got some moves I know. I can take care of myself. But I'll keep it in mind for anyone that really makes my skin crawl." She nods Steve's way. "I like your suspension hook."

"Huh." Bucky supposes that's a sort of professional compliment from one dom to another. 

They've drunk another quarter of the bottle before she rolls right way up and stands, all one fluid move. Whatever she did to Steve, she did in three-inch heels and skinny jeans. "Okay, that's enough for me. Thanks for the invitation." She drops the vodka bottle into that tote bag she carries, and turns at the door to smirk at them. "Sleep well, boys."

Bucky listens to her heels fade away down the corridor. He twists around to look at Steve properly. 

"She didn't hurt you, did she?"

Steve's face moves towards reassurance, before his expression shifts into the guilty shadow of a lie. "Yeah," Steve tells him, straight. "I'm pretty bruised. Could do with a bit of comfort right now."

"Shameless," Bucky murmurs, leaning up into a kiss. 

But all the same, it's nice to have an express request. This whole _acknowledging what you want and asking for it_ thing. Who would have thought he could get so deeply into it that he can't work out how he ever managed to navigate his sex life before.

**

It's not perfect, though, and maybe it's never going to be.

One time they're fucking, late night, he's just come home from taking down a furniture expo, feeling fuzzy-headed and sore and perfectly happy to be pounced on barely two minutes after coming in the door. Steve's giving it to him in a fast, rough rhythm that he rides dreamily, letting his mind slip, letting all his aches and pains fade away. It's nothing that brings it on. Just Steve's sweaty hand in his hair, tugging gently, but he knows that feeling from somewhere else and it drops him into a deep well of memory. The arousal disappears as quickly as a burst balloon, the dreamy pleasure with it, and all that's left is the intrusion inside him and a sudden, tearing memory of pain.

"Red," he grinds out, though they're not even in any kind of scene. "Red, red."

Steve is out of him in a second, kneeling beside him on the bed, not touching him apart from fingertips trailing lightly down his flank. 

"Did I hurt you?"

Bucky screws his eyes shut, caught in a net of memory. What turns his stomach now is the hopelessness he'd learned in that place. He can hear his own voice telling himself to let it happen, to cast his mind forward to the time it would be over, and think about what he'd have to do then. Bucky puts his forehead down on the mattress and screws his head left to right. 

"Oh, Buck." He can feel Steve's touch hovering a fraction above his back. Fuck off, Steve. Fuck off. Christ, he can practically feel the chipped tiles of the bathroom floor against his cheek, smelling like a sewer. He shrinks away and Steve gets the message at last. 

After a long shower, Steve comes back into the room. Bucky's managed to get the rest of his clothes off by then and burrow under the covers. Steve switches off the light and crawls in beside him. 

"Is there anything I can do?" he asks. 

"What do you think?" Bucky sighs, thinking that finding an outlet for Steve's heroic impulses is not the kind of task he's got the energy for right now. 

After a pause, Steve says, "Okay. Night then." 

Sometimes it makes Bucky so mad he could scream, the way Steve has slowly lured him into craving touch, and the way that's the first thing to go when he has a turn like this. Any other time, his favourite place in the world is in this bed, clinging like a barnacle to Steve's back. 

"Turn around," he says, and despite how curt he sounds, Steve does it. 

He sighs as Bucky's arms slide around him, in a way that makes Bucky think he's too easily satisfied. But he lets Bucky cling there as his pulse slowly settles. Bucky waits out the protest in his nerves at the unwanted human proximity. It's a matter of minutes before his teeth stop clenching. Then it starts to get better at last. 

Steve's so solid and warm, heavy with patience and satisfaction, that Bucky's body relaxes, bit by bit. Enough for his dick to start responding out of habit to the muscled curve of Steve's ass pressed up against it and the memory of unfinished business. 

"Mmm," Steve says sleepily. "You want me to do something about that?" 

Bucky shifts his hips back a bit, away from temptation. "Uh-uh. Better not." 

The silence is different now, comforting instead of fragile. 

"Was there something I did?" Steve asks, speaking low. "Something I should stop doing?" 

"No," Bucky tells him. It was his own fault. He let himself go. He normally keeps himself pretty grounded in the present – his eyes catching on familiar things, tethered by the sound of Steve's voice. "There's no reason. I think it's just gonna keep happening sometimes." 

That badly timed little flare of arousal has ebbed enough that he can close the gap between them, tuck his legs close up behind Steve's. "Thanks."

Steve's gone still in his arms, slipping away. "'S all right," he mumbles. 

For a few minutes, Bucky lies there, drifting on the rhythm of their breathing, falling into synch then out again, and thinks, yeah, maybe it is. 

**

Steve is going over the sink with the cloth a second time when the text chimes. 

_Waiting for my ride,_ Bucky tells him. _Gonna be a bit late._

He knows Bucky already warned his mother not to be put off by how the neighbourhood looks. But all the same, he goes out to the front steps and waits until her little blue hatchback has pulled up a little down the street. She parks it neatly and walks towards him with a nod. 

"He's been held up," he tells her, noticing just as he says it how out-of-character the tardiness is. "On his way though."

When she reaches him, she puts her hands on his shoulders and pulls him down to kiss him on the cheek, and the act of bending down to her is so familiar that for a second he can't find his words. 

"Uh," he says, thrown by whatever scent it is in her make-up or her hair that pulls him toward another time and place. "Come on in. I'll show you around." 

He climbs the stairs fighting off the most ridiculous flutter of nerves over whether it will all be good enough. It's the third time they've met, and he wouldn't say he's confident of her approval just yet. 

The verdict takes a while to come. He shows her the unrefurbished side of the building first, so she can see from the dank condition of the storage space how much work he had to do on his side. She observes it quietly, and gets quieter still when he opens the door into his apartment.

It's looking its best after a day of cleaning, the windows sparkling with midday sunshine from all Bucky's work on them yesterday, the bondage equipment in the office all packed away with the blinds up and fresh air streaming in. The sofa cushions are askew from a friendly tussle that turned into a bit of light making out before Bucky left for his appointment with Sam's physio - and actually all that sunshine is highlighting the faint tracks from the mop on the floorboards, and a few smudges of dust they missed. He tells her a bit more about the building's history, and takes her through to the tiny kitchen, which almost looks inviting these days with all the clever little storage tricks they've added. He doesn't miss how she casually pulls back the curtain to their bedroom and gives it a once-over. While it's showing the signs of being lived in – a discarded sweater, a jumble of both their shoes under the chair in the corner, and the overflow of Bucky's paperbacks stacked beside the nightstand – it's nothing to be ashamed of. 

"You have a beautiful home," she says a little tightly. With that, she makes her way over to the window, where she stays for a bit longer than the view of the alley, the car park and the side of the neighbouring building really justifies. 

Steve has to ask twice whether she'd like a tea. She answers vaguely, still running her fingers over the leaves of one of Bucky's succulents that lives on the sill, but once they're sitting at the new table with the steaming pot between them, her attention assumes the quietly honed focus he knows. 

"You've put a lot of work into this place," she observes. "It's very handsome." 

Steve doesn't try to hide his grin. "It's Bucky work too. A lot of things have changed since he moved in."

She takes a few tentative sips from her tea, and doesn't look displeased with it. 

"You offered him a job just like that?" she asks evenly. "Here in your home?" 

That makes him think for a moment, because even back in the beginning he'd never thought of it as dangerous, really, and now it's downright impossible to see Bucky's arrival in his life as anything but a blessing. 

"I've got pretty good instincts about people."

She looks at him like she knows there's more, but he can't explain to her that weird electricity between them that first time, the complicated charge of resistance and longing he'd felt when he put his hands on Bucky in front of a room full of people, and how much persistence it had taken to find the right way for them both to acknowledge that need and start to satisfy it. 

"I can see that." Her gaze flits over the big leather sofa, and the fluffy blankets folded over its arms. "Your business seems to be doing well."

He hesitates. "Well enough to pay the bills."

"I'd say there's other careers you could pursue if money was what mattered."

It must be those intent, black-fringed eyes that are so like Bucky's. That and the lack of judgment in her question. Maybe the way she's understood immediately how little the money side of the business motivates him. Before he knows it, he's explaining to her his whole philosophy on dominance and submission, the things he's observed about guilt and shame, how few people in the world give themselves permission to look their darkest desires fully in the face, let alone ask to have them met. How his job is to find a way to give them satisfaction without responsibility, for an hour or two at least, and close out all those tricky moral reckonings on the other side of the door. He's got a good way into it before he remembers he's unloading all this kink theory on the mother of the man he loves, who he badly wants to make a good impression on. She must pick up the way it makes him waver, because she asks,

"It's safe, what you do. Isn't it? Safe for you, I mean"

No one's ever asked him that before, not even Bucky. It brings up a little pinch of pain under his ribs, even though he can't help smiling. "Yeah. I've learned a few tricks."

He tells her about the outside cameras, and the payment records, the gym routines that keep him centered, and the fact that he's not the only one keeping an eye on his mental health these days.

"Seems like he's made you his responsibility," she says, mouth quirking. "It was always that way with James."

He seizes the opportunity to turn the conversation in a new direction. "I thought the family called him Bucky."

She takes a deep breath and cups her hands around the warm tea. For a while he thinks she's not going to answer. "There was a time he didn't care for it. When he was working out what to do instead of college. He had some false starts in those years, and he was a sensitive boy, behind the charm. He felt things deeply. He was just finding his people when--"

One of her hands fans open expressively to complete the sentence. Steve thinks what a miracle it is that, after everything he's been through, Bucky turned out to be one of the most stubbornly open-hearted people he knows, but he can't manage to say it past the lump in his throat. 

Winifred puts her cup down abruptly. "I'm forgetting myself. Here. You mustn't think much of me, turning up empty handed."

Reaching down for her handbag, she pulls out a cellophane-wrapped parcel of cookies, tied with a red checked ribbon. 

"Uh," Steve says, feeling like he's slipped into a parallel life of dinner parties and hand-picked flower bouquets. "Thanks. I'll –"

He takes the parcel over to the sink and flips up a drained plate to set it on. But it's too early for cookies. Bucky will be back any minute with lunch.

"Is she family?"

It takes Steve a moment to realise she's noticing the picture of Peggy that sits on the shelf above the sink, the one he talks to sometimes when he's got the house to himself. 

He's not ready to talk about the workplace accident that took her away from him, but he finds himself speaking about his days in the police force, the parts that gave him a channel to do the good he'd joined up to do, and all the bureaucracy that thwarted it. 

He's still talking when Bucky comes back, almost an hour late but carrying a big paper bag from the patisserie and unrepentantly grinning. He bends down to kiss his mother on the cheek. From the way she reaches up to his hair – cut short since she saw him last – and nearly gets her fingers in it before he's standing up again, Steve knows that's the last he'll have of her attention.

They sit down to spinach and goat's cheese pastries and the salad he put together this morning, and talk about family news. She relates how Becca is getting on, how her youngest boy is taking taekwondo. She talks about friends from Bucky's childhood, who she hears news of through parents she keeps in touch with. It's an exchange of information that Steve used to think of as gossip when he overheard his own mother doing it, on the phone to one of her aunts. Listening to it now, it sounds like something else, like these little scraps of information, these threads of story, are knitting together a world that Bucky can come back to, when he's ready.

"Let me take that," he says, blinking, and stacks their plates to go do some washing up. 

While he's washing, he keeps an ear on the soft-voiced conversation behind him. Over the year they've known each other, he's watched Bucky learn to let his defences down around Steve, but even at his most candid, there's usually a note of fond teasing in it, or a sly hint of invitation. With his mother, he's just flat-out vulnerable, open like Steve doesn't think he gets for anybody else on the planet. He thinks about what Winifred said, that Bucky had been a sensitive boy, behind the easy laughter, and feels a powerful surge of protectiveness for the young man he never met, just on the cusp of figuring out his place in the world.

Bucky's telling her one of the same stories Steve had, about the days when the building housed a printing press. 

There's a pause when the story's done. "You like it, Ma?" he asks softly.

A couple of breaths go by before she answers. "You're happy here." 

He sneaks a peek over his shoulder. She's looking at her son in a way Steve remembers: like she's aching to reach out and touch.

He shakes those cookies out onto the plate and brings them over. Bucky glances at the plate, at his mother, and gingerly takes one. The silence speaks for itself as he tastes it. Steve feels as if he might as well leave the room. She's watching him eat the cookie – the one Steve raises to his mouth is soft, and tastes of peanut butter – and it's clear they're both someplace in the past, someplace Steve can't follow. 

"Thanks, Ma," he says. "Just like I remember."

When it's over, when they're out on the street watching her car round the bend and disappear, Steve's sorrow isn't just for Bucky this time. 

After a while, Bucky clears his throat.

"You two had a nice talk then?" he asks, hooking his thumb into Steve's back pocket.

"Yeah," Steve answers without thinking. 

And then his instincts put it together at last, the intent in Bucky's voice and the strangeness of his being late in the first place. Steve's throat closes up for a moment. He's only taking the most precious relationship he has in the world and finding a sneaky way to share it. 

All of a sudden, the street is far too public for the things he wants to do to Bucky. "How about you come inside and I'll tell you more about it?"

Bucky comes compliantly, with a little self-satisfied smirk. "How about I do that."

In the corridor, they lunge for each other, shoving and kissing, hands working busily until they can bring each other off pressed up against the wall, breath in each other's mouths. 

**

Steve's a good public speaker, Bucky has learned. He's a good speaker because he's a clear thinker. Everything's straight in his mind, what's right and what's wrong, what works and what doesn't. He's got an inexhaustible well of faith in the world. He sees the worth of small things, and doesn't have to shower them in rhetoric to make them seem important. Conviction like that is its own kind of poetry. He wears his heart on his sleeve, without pretence, without posturing, and that, more than anything, attracts people to him.

Bucky doesn't watch his masterclasses very often because he knows he's a distraction. But he likes to stand in the shadowy corners, or just outside the door, and listen to Steve in his element. You might think Bucky of all people would have nothing more to learn about Steve's thoughts on dominance, but really, most of the things Steve talks about they haven't even gotten around to trying yet. Come to think of it, since that early burst of experimentation, it's been a while since they tried anything kinky at all. 

He's not surprised when Steve gets invited to speak at a big fetish meet-up in San Francisco. 

What he is surprised by, a few days into it, is how fiercely he misses him. They've been apart before, while Bucky's been out of town setting up an exhibit. They're apart all the time now that Bucky's started to go visit his dad, which is an overnight bus journey both ways. But those times he's always been busy. It's different when he's alone in the house, missing the smell of Steve's peppermint tea, ears cocked for the sound of a key in the lock. He goes out to a movie with a couple of the dance crew, and comes back to a dark house. The office is empty and neat. The erotic energy and human messiness that Steve's work leaves behind, it's not something you can see, but there's a prickle on his skin that's missing, a warmth that usually charges the air. For a moment when he slides into the cold bed, he gets a flashback to those weeks fresh out of prison, totally adrift and insignificant, lying on that thin foam mattress and thinking that, apart from Stanley, not a single person on the face of the planet would even notice if he passed away in his sleep. 

If it all looks less grim in the light of morning, it doesn’t stop him scrolling Natasha's retweets until he finds a link that leads to the meet-up, and, eventually, to the blog of a writer who's covering it. There's an entry from two days ago, an interview with _one of the undisputed stars on the main stage, a steady-voiced Dom who gets around in unassuming denim and works under the name The Captain._ The writer has clearly paid attention to Steve's obvious virtues, noting his trademark earnestness, the softly-spoken doggedness that takes a little longer to spot, as well as his indisputable commitment to his gym routine. Then the encounter takes an unexpected turn. 

_When I ask Rogers whether his busy booking schedule has left him with time to find a partner, for the first time his openness falters. That's off-limits, he tells me, with a softness that sounds a lot like yes. I tell him that, if he does, they must be the best kept submissive in the country. Off limits, he repeats, this time in the authoritative voice I heard on stage that morning. When I canvas a few conference guests over drinks, they endorse my conclusion, often with undisguised envy._

_The Captain only does one hands-on session, in addition to the panels. It's a suspension scene characterised by lingering touches, murmurs of praise, and an audience that seems to hold its breath for the entire fifty-minute duration._

Bucky digests all that, leaning over the kitchen counter with his coffee going cold. 

He takes a couple of coils of rope from the cupboard in the office and lays them on the bed to take a picture. 

_Best kept submissive in America …_ he texts along with it. 

He digs out that package from the bottom drawer and peels away the plastic wrap to reveal a black plug. Dauntingly solid, with no conceivable purpose except kink, it's always seemed a step too far. But he snaps a picture of that too and sends it off before he can have second thoughts _… all alone with a house full of toys._

He knows there was a big wrap-up party last night, but it doesn't stop him checking his phone for a reply. It's ten a.m. before he gets one, then they don't stop coming. Steve sends pictures of the check-out counter, the cab stand, the donut shop at the terminal. When his messages fall silent after take-off, it gives Bucky time to think, and what he thinks is that the three-minute urgent fumble his body seems to want right now is not going to be enough. He's not the jealous type, but he knows what belongs to him, and he wants all of Steve's attention, all afternoon. He wants as long as it takes to remind them both that nothing Steve can get in San Francisco holds a candle to what's waiting for him at home. 

He lays out his collar, and the rope, and the toy, then he switches on the shower and takes his time getting himself ready. After that, he closes the blinds and curls up on the sofa with a book to wait. 

It's another half hour before the next volley of photos begins. Tarmac through an airplane window. The backs of passengers blocking the aisle. A blurry shot of the arrivals hall. Back seat of a cab. Bucky's heart rate steadily climbs until there it is, the tinkle of a key in the exterior lock. Footsteps in the corridor. He holds his breath.

"Hi." Steve just stands there, bag in hand, grinning.

Bucky glances at his book like he's sorry to put the story aside. "How was your flight?"

"Too fucking long."

He's dropping his bag and striding over, and Bucky rolls up on his knees on the sofa to meet him. There's no playing cool, once he's got Steve in his arms. In fact, he's the one clutching Steve's hair in his fingertips, trying to holds him in a kiss he can't seem to get his fill of. It starts bruising and takes a long time to gentle. Steve pulls back just enough so that Bucky can't get what he wants, then closes the gap, and does it a few times more, until the power imbalance of the height difference starts to set something kindling low in his belly. 

"Hey," he says, thumbing at Bucky's cheek, smiling that dopey, tender smile that makes Bucky's heart clench up behind his ribs as he promises himself there's a hard limit of two days apart from now on. 

At last, Bucky extracts himself from Steve's arms to lie back on the sofa. He's wearing his wispiest track pants, narrow legs, bare feet, a t-shirt that's not his own, and he gives Steve a chance to look over it all appreciatively. 

"Didn’t hook up with any eager submissives down south then?"

Steve shakes his head sadly and sinks down on his knees beside the sofa. "Not one." 

His eyes are tracking up and down Bucky' body like there was nothing else in the house. He pushes the t-shirt up and leaves a soft kiss on Bucky's navel, a little wet click of contact, and after four days' absence, Bucky's system is so keyed up for him that there's a faint jerk of response under Bucky's track pants, unhidden by that one thin layer. 

"No action here either, huh?" He pulls the t-shirt back in place modestly, and draws a deep breath like a man about to spend a long time underwater. "Think we could play a little?"

He's thumbing gently over Bucky's abdomen, that unconscious touching he does when he can't help himself. The answer's yes, and more fervently yes with each passing moment. Bucky has got a satisfying day's work done, in between the texts, Steve's diary is all in order, his levels of trust in the world are pretty high. And it's settled him more than he realised, having Steve back in the house. He feels close to invincible. 

"That's the general idea. Pass me that." 

After a pause, Steve picks up the collar from the coffee table. They hadn't used it for a while, so Bucky had had to go looking before he found it, once again shoved right to the back of the cupboard. He takes it from Steve and turns it around in his hands, mulling over a suspicion he's had before. 

"What lucky client did you buy this for?" 

"Used to be mine. When I first started, I didn't know where I fit in. I thought maybe I was on the sub side, but it turned out I just had to learn to trust my own strength." 

"It was hidden away pretty good."

Steve bites his lip. "Thought you wouldn't want it in the bedroom."

"I don't want it in your office either. Not anymore." 

Steve just says, "Oh," and looks at Bucky like he's the last popsicle in the store on a hot summer's day.

Bucky strips his shirt off. He winds the collar through his fingers, letting the silence build. There's something to be said for the rituals of BDSM, that's for sure. The tension's crackling between them, with Steve on his knees, waiting for Bucky to hand the collar back and, with it, control of what they do next.

"So what happens now?" Steve asks demurely after a while.

"You don't need a map for this." 

Steve glances at the table, which holds a rope, and that stark black plug, and a bottle of slick. They're both talking in a hush.

"I'm going tie you up and then put this in you?"

Bucky makes an equivocal noise. "There's a middle step there. Thought you might get me good and wet first." 

Steve's looking at him hungrily, as if Bucky doesn't hear much more graphic suggestions than that through the office door on a weekly basis. 

"But-" Steve looks pained, like he can't bear to ask. "You're sure?"

"Pretty green so far. And if that changes, I'll speak up."

Blinking fast, Steve looks down. "You know you don't have to do this. Don't you? There's no competition."

Now Bucky feels the embarrassment. 

"You want to hear me say that I want this?" Steve's preferences blow so strong, it's easy to coast on them. There's maybe part of him that sees this as just giving in to what Steve needs. But that's the easy way. "All right. I know I don't have to. I want it. I want to do this with you." 

Bucky's known for a while he could get to this place, with enough time. From Steve's dazzling smile, it looks like he didn't. 

"Well?"

The undisputed star of the fetish convention just looks at the proffered collar for a few dumbstruck moments. But once he takes it from Bucky's grasp, it's all on. 

Steve's touch is confident as he loops the collar around Bucky's neck and slides the tongue through the buckle, holding it clear of the skin with two fingers while he fastens it and tucks the loose end into its band. He hooks his finger into the D-ring and tugs gently, and – Christ – Bucky had no idea, looking in from the outside, how huge that gesture could feel, all that control in the crook of one finger and Bucky giving him permission to do it. When Steve does it again, he can feel his eyes softly closing, his mouth going slack. 

"Is that a yes?" Steve murmurs. Bucky makes a sound that he hopes comes out as affirmative. Steve kisses the corner of his mouth with a sound of his own, and that's something else he never imagined, how it would feel to have all that helplessness tangled up with trust and faith and the steady grip Steve has on his heart. His whole body is getting light. 

And that's just from the collar. They've barely even started yet. 

The rope looks ridiculously long. Every step in the tie takes forever with all those yards and yards of cable to pull through each loop, but that’s part of the experience, the texture of it slithering over his skin, the weight of it knocking against his legs as he kneels on the sofa. He doesn't doubt Steve's claim that he can tie a basic chest harness in under three minutes, with an experienced model, but today he's taking it slow. 

He's seen Steve do this to people a few times now, but this is a new step for the two of them to take together. The idea of the rope doesn't heat him beyond lukewarm. The deft precision of Steve's work, though, the gentle touches and the slowly encroaching helplessness, that's another story. Steve's got his arms crossed behind his back, each fist curled up against the opposite forearm. He's looped the bindings several times around both adjacent wrists, leisurely movements with a reassuring, predictably rhythm, followed up with perpendicular loops to cinch the bonds between his wrists and pull them too tight to slide back out of. He can't resist testing them. 

"You doing okay, Buck?"

Bucky gives a vague murmur of assent, starting to feeling a bit untethered. He lets his eyes fall half-closed. It's not one of those times he needs to anchor himself to familiar objects. This isn't something that's going to trigger unwanted memories. It hardly feels like sex at all. The low-level arousal is coursing all through him. It's like the spacey sense of contentment he gets when Steve's writing on him, only more charged, with a real thread of hunger running through it. 

"I'm going to fasten you a bit tighter now." 

When Steve pushes his bound hands higher up his spine, he feels the pull in all his muscles immediately, and the strain in his joints. 

"Is that okay on your shoulder?"

"Yeah."

He makes himself breathe in and out slow as Steve runs the cord from his wrists under his right arm and back over the shoulder, then repeats the action on the other side, linking the loops over his breastbone. When he pulls tight, Bucky's whole torso has to bend to accommodate the strictures. It doesn't hurt exactly, beyond a mild strain, but it leaves his arms and shoulders completely immobilised, tight as a knot. For the first time, he feels like a plaything, shaped and displayed for someone else's pleasure. 

"Steve."

"Hmmm?" He sounds a bit dreamy himself, but he puts his fingers in Bucky's hair from behind and rubs gently, the way he sometimes does when Bucky can't sleep. "You're doing great."

And there it is again. The resistance melting into something else, a fight-or-flight response with nowhere to go, that builds and fizzes warmly in his belly. He relaxes into it, and the strain melts out of him. Steve keeps it up for a while anyway, rubbing gently at his scalp and murmuring low scraps of praise just behind his ear. 

By the time Steve shores up the bindings, with extra loops digging into the slight narrowing at the top and bottom of his biceps, he knows he's being rendered helpless, but all he feels is secure. It's like an extension of Steve wrapped around him: his heart working through his hands, his hands on the rope, the rope binding Bucky. 

All he can see of the rope is the Y-shape that meets below the juncture of his collarbones and twists down towards his belly for a few inches before it divides and angles shallowly down around his mid ribs. But behind him, there's a lot more complication going on, as Steve finishes the six-point star that meets up in his mid-back and works in more of those cross-loops that cinch the strands together and pull the harness tighter around him. 

When it's all done, with the last of the cord wrapped neatly around the strands over his spine and tucked in place, Steve touches him, a finger tracing between his ass cheeks through his track pants. It makes him jolt, one last instinctive spike of panic, but the tie holds him, and the panic settles again. He's secure in his bonds. Steve kisses his shoulder. "Easy. I've got you."

His heart rate slows like the muscle is responding directly to Steve's voice commands now. That's how it's been the whole time, though. Spikes of adrenalin that settle into a lower and lower baseline of calm, a gradual descent towards acceptance.

He's feeling kind of drifty now, acutely conscious of Steve's presence behind him while everything else has faded to a blur. Steve is skimming his hands over his work, leaving sparks wherever he touches. 

"Anywhere you can't feel? Let me know."

He pinches the tips of each one of Bucky's fingers in turn.

"Good?" he asks, kissing Bucky's shoulder between the two strands. 

The teasing remarks he usually replies with are cloudy and far away. 

"Mmh," he manages, sounding like he has a mouth full of rocks. It's so good he feels drunk with it, but it's delicate, finely balanced. The wrong word, the wrong tone, could shatter this muddle-headed contentment and bring him crashing back to earth. Like anything worth having, it takes work to sustain. 

He gets up, wobbly, and turns in a shuffle so they're facing each other. Steve's pink-cheeked, his jacket off, still wearing the rumpled t-shirt from the plane. His eyes drift closed when Bucky leans in to kiss him, but his hands come up to steady him, taking control. Kissing Steve with his whole upper body bound, nothing but his mouth to work with, it's so different it sends a delicious thrill of transgression through him. Steve grasps him tighter and turns up the pace, and it doesn't take much of Steve's tongue making free with the depths of his mouth to get him wanting more. And that feeds into the realisation that he's given away all his leverage, and the only way he can get more is to ask for it. 

It takes all the core strength he can call on to lower himself to his knees. 

"Go on." Practically eye level with the bulge in Steve's jeans, he looks up with that challenge that's always sure to spark a response. "Since my hands are out of action."

For a couple of moments, Steve's gaze keeps tracking over him, like the words aren't penetrating. Then his hand moves eagerly, tearing open the top button of his jeans, and all of a sudden Bucky can feel it like an intruder stalking the periphery of his mind, the sort of memory he does not want to let in. He twists his wrists to pull the rope tighter and anchor himself in the present. Shit. He can see the thick outline of Steve's dick now, and he doesn't want it making a mess of his throat the way he thought he did. 

"Wait. Hold up."

The haze of arousal recedes and suddenly he's alarmed to realise how vulnerable is, how deeply in Steve's power he's put himself. He tugs against his bonds in earnest this time, but they're too expertly tied to slip far. 

"Bucky?" Steve sounds hoarse, a bit unravelled, in the way he gets when a scene takes him out of himself, reminding him that those bindings don't mean he's the only one vulnerable here. Jesus, he takes back every flippant thing he ever thought about BDSM being a game. This shit is dangerous, if it goes wrong. He's not about to let it go wrong. 

He looks at Steve's hand, frozen in a white-knuckled grip on his jeans, and makes himself picture it holding a slender felt-tip pen and delicately sketching a shadow made out of pin-prick sized dots. He tries to find the headspace he was in before, when the rope felt like an extension of Steve wrapping around him, but it's not the sort of place he can get to with just a blink and a wish.

"I think-" His mouth clenches around the things he can't quite get in words. He has to breathe in deep and start again. "Keep going, but I think it's gonna have to be me running it for a while."

"We should take a break." Steve's not meeting his eyes, distress etched on his face.

"No. Hey." He's tied up, he can't even reach out to reassure Steve with his touch. "Hey, come back here. It's okay." The thought opens up like a pit in his mind, that it's not just a question of permanently spooking himself; it would be even worse if he managed to poison Steve's confidence too. "It felt good back there. Really good." Goddamn words, why can't he find the right ones? "How about you touch me some more and tell me how well I'm doing? Steve? Please."

He's pretty sure Steve can't turn down an open invitation to care-giving, and he's right. A few deep breaths later, Steve's stepped in closer so he can stroke Bucky's hair back from his face, fingers carding through the weight of it. If it doesn't immediately suck him back under, it's enough to restore the intense connection between them, and Bucky's sense of safety with it. 

"I put my whole self into it, when it's you," Steve tells him quietly, looking at his fingers' work and not quite meeting Bucky's eyes. "I don't even know what my limits are any more."

"You always hear me when I need you to." Bucky inhales deeply then leans forward, as close as he can get to the open fly of Steve's jeans. "And right now I'm telling you I want more."

Steve shuffles forward with a groan, bringing himself in reach, and Bucky's so relieved that he presses his whole face into Steve's crotch, feeling the twitch of Steve's dick against his cheek. He rubs against the soft cotton and hardening flesh behind it shamelessly, craving the simplicity of arousal and satisfaction. He pulls back to take in the outline of it, now obvious through Steve's briefs, thick around the base, nestled to the right but starting to push its way forward, straining the fabric.

"Mmm," Bucky says mindlessly, before he opens his mouth over it, swiping his tongue up slow and hard enough to be felt through cotton. It jerks against him, a tangible pulse, and fills out a little more, so he can change angle and straddle it with his lips, nipping gently. Steve's fingers go utterly still against his scalp, so he does it again, working his way up to the tip, which he sucks wetly until he can taste salt. And if he lays the moaning on just a bit thicker than usual, it's not a lie, because he's only giving himself permission to express the hunger he feels. He's been thinking about Steve's dick for nearly four days straight now. 

"I really like this," he says, leaving slow kisses over the glossy wet patch that's starting to reek of sex now. "Let me have this." 

Steve lets him all right, lets him mouth at his cock just exactly how he likes, and it's kind of dreamy good, nuzzling against the hot cotton and then, when Steve impatiently strips himself free, shaping his mouth around the girth of Steve's dick, blindly lapping at the leaking tip with his tongue, letting himself get a bit wild with it. It's not as if Steve's dick is the first he's got acquainted with, but it still feels new to have the patience and the freedom to take his time and give it the devotion it deserves. Immobilised by the rope, with his entire attention zeroed in on tending to Steve's pleasure, it's so sexy, the intense focus and the squishy, helpless sounds his throat makes, that he loses track of himself until Steve pulls back, cinching his dick tight in his hand and making that screwed up face he gets when he's on the verge of too much. 

"Fuck. You gotta cool it if you want this inside you." 

"Sorry," Bucky says without the slightest hint of regret, and Steve makes a pained sound with his hand still on his dick. "You want to get me ready then?"

He'd been thinking of the slick, but he should have known better. A few moments later, he's naked, bent at ninety degrees, chest resting on the back of the sofa, tense down to his curling toes, while Steve holds his cheeks apart and makes him wait. The first time they did this, he gritted his teeth and waited for it to be over. But Steve's been upping his game every time since then – if he's too trusting to really get the measure of people in the everyday, he's a fucking magician at reading them in bed. He's got the perseverance of a hungry cat, and he's made it his personal mission to get Bucky on board with this obscenely intimate act. Steve leans in so close his hot breath teases at the damp skin of Bucky's exposed asshole and makes it helplessly clench. 

"Please."

Steve kisses him daintily over his tailbone and acts dumb. "Yeah? What do you need, Buck?" 

Oh Christ, it's humiliating. He's writhing against his bonds a little now, and all that does is rub his nipples hard against the sofa leather. "Steve."

"I've got you, baby. Just need you to tell me what you want."

He ghosts the tip of one finger right over Bucky's entrance, purely to make the muscles tighten greedily, and it's unbearably intense with his arms tied and no other means of release. He draws in a sob of a breath.

"C'mon, Buck." He's always so gentle when he's like this, as though he were here to help Bucky instead of calculatingly driving him insane. "Say it for me. That's all you need to do. Then I can give you what you need."

The sweetness of it shatters him. Steve's here for him. Steve's got this. He's all right. 

"Please. Please, honey, stop playing around and put your mouth on me."

He hasn't even got the last word out before Steve's going in soft with the flat of his tongue, one hot swipe after the other smashing Bucky's self-control like egg shell. He struggles like he always does with this, needing more, needing it to be over, but it's all too easy for Steve to hold him in place and take what he wants, first with his mouth then, when Bucky's ready to ask nicely for it, two clever fingers that know just where to stroke to make Bucky's knees go weak.

By the time Steve's lining himself up, making those little warning thrusts right over his hole that trigger the muscle memory of penetration and signal his body to surrender, there's nothing left in Bucky's head but steam. With his eyes screwed shut, he's floating on sensation, every thought radiating back to that hot connection between them and the promise of what comes next. 

The pressure in his head goes quiet when Steve pushes inside him. That's it. That's what he's there for. The ache of resistance fades. His body knows the give-and-take of this now, knows it better than dancing, the hot steel of Steve's thrusts forcing him apart, the greedy clench of his muscles trying to keep him inside. He coasts on the low murmur of Steve's voice, barely registering the sweet jumble of filth he's verbalising, until it turns quiet, and then silent, and Steve clutches hard around Bucky's hips, pressing right up against the back of his thighs as if he could possibly get deeper inside than he already is, and there it is, the tremor and jerk of Steve coming inside him at last. 

After maybe a half a minute of clumsy petting and heaving breaths, Steve pulls out, and in his place is the inanimate weight of the plastic plug, cool and slippery against the worked-up flesh of his entrance. 

"Tell me if it's too much," Steve murmurs. 

"Oh god." Bucky feels clammy and feverish all over, and so empty he's ready to die of it. "Yes. Yes, fuck."

It's not as huge as it seemed in his hand. Or he's so high on arousal he's lost the ability to feel pain. His body opens up neatly, right up until that last aching stretch where he almost thinks he's not going to be able to take it, and then it's inside him, clenched snugly in place. Christ, he's tied up and filthy and full of Steve's come, and his balls are throbbing now, the end of his endurance approaching like a brick wall, when Steve nuzzles against his hip with a sigh then tugs the ropes to pull him upright, flips him around as easy as a pillow, and swallows his cock. Bucky doesn't even know what noises he's making from then on in, animal grunts beyond words, from a distance they probably sound like Steve's knifing him, that's how good it is. The closer Steve takes him, the tighter his body gets, clenching around the thick plastic inside him so he's getting worked up both inside and out. When he comes, it's with a whimper, on what feels like the last breath in his lungs.

Slowly he becomes aware of his body again. His arms are knotted and tight behind him, shoulders clenched. Steve's kissing his belly, rubbing his nose and forehead gently against it with soft, hungry noises of pleasure. _Beautiful,_ he catches in there somewhere, _perfect,_ and he never knew it was possible to feel so thoroughly used and so precious all at once. 

When Steve's fingers slide up under the twist of rope that runs down Bucky's breastbone, the skin underneath is numb at first, then it quickly starts to sting as he realises with a jolt that he's probably rubbed himself raw with all the struggling he was doing, half out of his mind with frustration. 

"Better take care of that for you," Steve says, rising to move them both towards the comfort of the bedroom, and that kicks off a slow half-hour of unfastening the bindings and rubbing the circulation back into his arms.

Later, Bucky's lying with the plug in, feeling the muscle clench around it. His skin down there is all worked up, so sensitive that it sparks off a new shiver of sensation every time he moves. He's breathing shallowly so Steve can stay pillowed on his chest, curled on his side with his legs tucked through the triangle of space beneath Bucky's bent knees. He strokes down the heavy muscle of Steve's arm and thinks it's funny how his head is clear now, he feels replenished and energised, and maybe just a bit fucking triumphant with how far he pushed himself, and Steve's the one who seems needy, clinging to Bucky like he's not ready to acknowledge them as separate beings yet.

"I meant to pick up some of those custard tarts you like," Steve mumbles. "And a bottle of something blue or orange to keep you hydrated."

Bucky smiles, unexpectedly charmed by Steve being so eager to get home to him that his professional instincts failed him. 

"Stores are still open," Bucky tells him, just to make him turn his face into Bucky's chest and groan, his beard tickling everywhere it goes. 

"Don't worry," Bucky adds after a while. "I didn't let the fridge run down to empty."

That triggers an unwelcome train of thought in Steve. "You want dinner?"

It's only just getting dark, and Bucky's got his mind on one more thing he wants to try before he even thinks about leaving this bed. 

"Sure. If you don't have the stamina for round two yet."

God bless Steve's predictable reaction to a challenge. Maybe he's always been easy to rile on that count, but Bucky reckons he's got a knack for it. He pushes himself up on his elbow, glaring down at Bucky with indignation beyond words.

"Oh?" Bucky enquires innocently. "Is that a yes then?"

A few moments after that, he's on his hands and knees over a doubled-up towel with Steve's attentive fingers switching between tugging gently at the plug to make his muscles tense in resistance, and slipping up between his thighs to cup his balls until he's pressing back into the touch, eager for more. And there's that sensation again, of being an object, a plaything, and god he's starting to like it. When it's Steve, it gives him a thrill. 

The plug slurps messily as it comes out, but he doesn't have time to think about it before Steve's easing his way back in with what feels like a token swipe of lube. It turns him on even harder than he expected, the thought of Steve using his own leftovers to ease the way, like Bucky's body didn't even have a chance to be his own again in between.

He gets rough, now that Bucky's got his hands free to steady himself, striking right up against his tailbone, the way Bucky sometimes gets in the mood for, that reminds him of those raw, no-nonsense hook-ups in the prison bathroom. 

"Steve." 

He doesn't know when that tone became a code between them, but it's reliable as hell. Steve strokes the width of his palm up Bucky's lower back and starts to talk.

"Hey Buck. You're so good like this. Letting me have you like this." He must be lost in the moment because it's frantic and breathless, with none of the practised control of when he's in his dom headspace. "You're so hot inside, I want to fuck you forever. Love your beautiful body, Buck. Love the way you open up for me. Love the way you come for me."

Bucky's dick gives a reflexive throb at that, and his hips curl in as if there was anything he could rub up against in this position. 

"Yeah go on, touch yourself, I want you to feel good."

They find a pace where Bucky can do that, with Steve holding him firm around the hips so he can balance on his good arm and jerk himself with his left, and if they can't quite time it to get to the finish line together, he's utterly lost track of himself when Steve groans his way through his orgasm, and he's barely had a chance to register Steve's fingers slipping into the hot mess inside him when he comes. 

With an inarticulate cry, he lets himself flop face-first into the mattress, and a couple of breaths later Steve's nestling in beside him, one arm over his back. It's dangerous to do this with the house fallen dark around them. They should get clean. They should get a drink. They should switch some lights on, otherwise the next thing they know it will be 3am and they'll be sleepy and sore and crabbily arguing about whether to change the sheets or have an early breakfast first. 

Steve tightens his arm, pressing a clumsy kiss to Bucky's bicep. "Still the best thing that ever happened to me."

It's the last thing Bucky remembers.

Somehow it's still a surprise when he ends up eating instant noodles out of cardboard cup at fuck-off-o'clock in the morning, leaning against the kitchen counter in his underpants while the best man Bucky's ever known puts the bed back in a fit state for them to sleep in.

That blog had said the fetish convention went so well they're thinking of running it every year, and Bucky is going to think hard about what he can do to make that happen. 

**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaand once again, that could be the end, or not, depending on how long our lockdown goes on, but whether it ends here or in a few chapters' time, it will always be happily (though not without work).
> 
> The second-last scene with Bucky's mom is specifically dedicated to msilverstar, whose comment on Not What You'd Call Properly Submissive ("I hope she can give Steve some of what he misses so much.") is what pushed me to speculating in that direction. Thank you!


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> His whole geography of the city has been transformed. This corner of it, from the bus station to the park, used to be where he knew the proprietors by name, where the streets felt most like home, where he sought out the alleyway shortcuts that would get him to the door of the club, and everything he looked forward to within it, just one minute sooner. Now, he feels like a visitor here. Home, for him, is across town, where he left Bucky sleeping off two days of heavy lifting and a four-hour drive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Huh. Turns out there was more to story to tell. You know what to expect by now. A bit of sadness, followed by more fluff than plot. And it turns out I got so much comfort out of picturing these two unlikely people finding their way to marriage that I wrote that whole sequence again, with a bit more context and no shame whatsoever.

Then there's the day Steve comes back from the gym early, because he doesn't want to be driving home when the black clouds hanging over the city decide to open fire. It's gloomy when he jogs up the front steps, wind kicking grit into his face and whistling eerily through the masonry gaps in the top storey. Bucky's still asleep when he comes in, his head wedged awkwardly between both their pillows. Steve is never sure what catches his attention – a sound or just a feeling – but when he steps closer, it's as clear as anything that Bucky is in distress, the air tight in his throat and his brow all clenched up.

"Bucky," he tries, sitting on the edge of the bed. "Hey, Buck."

He has to repeat it a few more times, and louder, before Bucky's eyes crack open, looking ahead, then hesitatingly tracking up to Steve's face. He'd almost forgotten that Bucky's eyes can do that. When the animation of emotion is gone, they turn fathomless and utterly blank, with the blue drained out to distant grey, like a clear lake under cloud, showing all the way down to the murky rocks and silt at the bottom. His eyes are skating over Steve with no sign of recognition or response, and it's chilling. 

"Hey." He settles his hand over the blanket at Bucky's thigh, in case it's one of those days when physical contact is a bad idea. "You okay, buddy?"

Bucky's gaze jerks down to his mouth, his neck, his hand, still devoid of recognition, just blankness grading into sadness now. 

"What is it?" He keeps his voice calm, tamping down the urge to find whatever did this to him and tear it apart down to its atoms. "Buck? Just a bad dream?"

He lowers himself down onto the bed, getting the two of them in parallel, and waits.

"I spent a lot of time in my head," Bucky says eventually, in a rusty sounding voice directed somewhere in the vicinity of the ceiling. "That first year I went in. Thinking about everything I was gonna do when I got out. Imagining I was doin' it already. I was a real fucking genius at dreaming, back then. Later I worked out that only makes it worse."

He lapses into silence.

"Mmm?" Steve prompts quietly.

Bucky's eyes close. After a few shallow breaths, he says, "I thought I dreamt you too."

Steve feels that in his chest, and shifts closer, just close enough to tip his forehead against Bucky's shoulder.

"I dunno. I feel pretty real."

He can hear Bucky exhale, slow. "I believed it. I was back in C House, some fellas I knew, bunch of new guys too. Just the same, just like I remember, even that yellow light over the door that flickered all night. I woke up in my old bed and you were a dream. This whole place was a dream. And I'd been shooting my mouth off to the whole crew about this feller who was waiting for me on the outside. Got myself so mixed up I'd started to believe my own lies." He sniffs gently. "Pretty stupid, huh?" 

Steve doesn't know what to say. It's obvious from its aftermath how vivid the dream was, and how deeply Bucky had believed it. He rolls back and plucks one of his markers from the nightstand. 

"Come here and I'll show you stupid." He takes Bucky's hand as he uncaps the pen with his teeth, and writes across his palm. "For next time you forget about me."

"Jerk," Bucky says, but he's laughing, if breathily. He watches Bucky curl his hand closed over the black ink and open it again. "You really are a jerk." A bit later, he rolls over towards the wall and adds, "I'm gonna stay here for a bit. They don’t need me until eleven."

"Okay." Steve gets to his feet. "You want a coffee?"

Bucky doesn't respond.

"Okay. You want a coffee and toast?"

This time he makes a considering noise, and Steve can't help his grin.

"You want a coffee and those whipped ricotta pancakes that I'm going to have to walk over to the gas station in the pouring rain to be able to make for you?"

"Yeah," Bucky says. "Those ones. That sounds okay."

"Okay?"

"Thanks," Bucky says, opening his palm again to read off it, "Steven Grant Rogers."

**

The menu only has four options for side orders: bacon, hash browns, tomatoes and beans. That's one of the things Steve used to like most about this place, when he'd drop in after his gym sessions, starving, and order his eggs with all four of them, then sit here for two hours feeling like a king, taking pity on all those poor saps clocking on for the day shift, like he'd used to do, back when he was on the government's payroll. When he'd first moved to the city, this little diner had been the center of his world, sitting right at the corner of the L-shape that joined up Sam's gym, the club, and the one-bedroom apartment he'd rented for his first three years.

Today, looking at the menu just brings home how far his perspective has shifted since then. Those four options seem bare now. He finds his eye seeking out the little hipster extras that he likes to point out to Bucky, the beetroot relish and morcilla sausage and house-cured trout, just to watch him scowl, and order it anyway, then curl his arm defensively around the plate like it's too good to let Steve stick his curious fork into. If he brought Bucky to this place, he'd nod at the simple menu approvingly, and say that's just the way a decent breakfast oughta be, and leave disappointed. 

The server catches his eye enquiringly and he nods. He's got more than an hour to kill before the earliest time he can drop his bike in for its service, and plenty of errands to fill it with when he's done here.

Actually, it's more than just his breakfast order. His whole geography of the city has been transformed. This corner of it, from the bus station to the park, used to be where he knew the proprietors by name, where the streets felt most like home, where he sought out the alleyway shortcuts that would get him to the door of the club, and everything he looked forward to within it, just one minute sooner. Now, he feels like a visitor here. Home, for him, is across town, where he left Bucky sleeping off two days of heavy lifting and a four-hour drive. Home is the blank facades of warehouses, the empty streets in the evenings, the rumble of 5am trucks, and the vibration of dance beats in the floorboards the moment he opens the front door.

"What can I get you?" asks the server, looking somewhere over Steve's shoulder. 

Bucky will be awake by now, wearing that extra charge of energy he gets from sleeping in his own bed after an absence. And Steve's crazy for him on an average day, even when they haven't been apart. He looks at the menu dumbly and can't work up an appetite for a single thing on it. 

"Sorry," Steve tells him. "Somewhere I gotta be."

He throws down a note for the coffee and ducks down one of those back-alley shortcuts to get to his bike just that twenty seconds faster.

He's maybe a little aroused already as he fumbles for his door key, just from thinking about the welcoming warmth of Bucky's body fresh out of bed, the sounds he makes when he hasn't been touched in too long. 

But when he opens the apartment door to find Bucky stretched out on the floor, shoulders bulging at the peak of each push-up, pink-faced and alive with his breath puffing as he forces himself to his limits. All that glistening bare flesh and nothing but an obscenely small pair of shorts. Steve's lungs want to burst like balloons. He barely remembers the moments after that, and then at last he's got Bucky pressed up against a door somewhere, laughing that easy laugh he falls into when Steve's giving him just the right side of too much, pleased and permissive and full of joy, while Steve sucks the sweat off his neck and fumbles for a way to get more of him, all of him at once. 

"Easy, tiger," Bucky says when Steve gets the cuffs on him, and he's not afraid – Steve's developed a very good ear for the sounds of fear and uncertainty in Bucky's voice. "Don’t you close those."

He looks at Steve, fondly bemused, as if he knows perfectly well who's running the dynamic between them. And as Steve goes down on his knees to get Bucky in his mouth, he thinks he's not wrong. He wants to tease out the submissive streak in Bucky, just enough to show him another side of himself – a resilient and trusting side that perhaps he didn't realise he could still tap into. He wants to pull on that thread just as much as Bucky can stand to let him, and not an inch more. 

They've been apart less than three days, but for some reason Steve is thirsty for him, and it's a thirst that can't be slaked just by stripping him off and making them both come. When they're done, he finds himself pressing his face into the soft skin of Bucky's neck, just behind the bristle, as he replays in his mind the jump of his abdominal muscles and all his sounds of satisfaction. The feeling only intensifies as his mind lets in the memory of how none of that perfection happened by accident, how hard Bucky had to work to let them have this together, how many times Steve told himself it was impossible and tried to stop wanting it. 

He wouldn't have put it in words, though, except that Bucky asks, a murmur against his temple, with his wrists still in those cuffs.

"You're in a mood today. What is it?"

He doesn't know he's about to put marriage on the table until he's done it. But the instant the words are out of his mouth, he knows they're right. He wants to pledge that to Bucky, the promise of forever. He knows that as certainly as he knows it's too soon for Bucky to start putting boundaries on a life that's only just been given back to him.

"I got to get used to it," Bucky tells him. "I'm still getting the hang of … who I am."

Later, driving his bike back to the mechanic, with the butterflies still flocking him his stomach, Steve asks himself whether it was a step too far. Bucky's the partner he wanted when he was a paramedic, when he was in the force, when his faith in the world was being eaten away, but is that the right foundation for marriage? Bucky's tender with his weak spots and merciless when he's letting pride get the best of him. He's formidable in a crisis, cool headed and unhesitating. He remembers his first impression of Bucky, as someone who was damaged and needed to be treated gently. He'd never have dreamed he was inviting into his life someone who was going to see wounds he didn't know he had, and quietly tend to them. 

He knows Bucky doesn't take it lightly, when he says he loves him. But he's too old to believe that love can overcome anything, and Bucky has so much potential he hasn't had a chance to realise yet. Would it be love to hold him back from that, when he loves Bucky's capability as much as anything? There's no way to be sure that their lives are growing in the same direction. The only way he can see it, there are going to be sacrifices ahead, and whoever has to make them ought to have the security of knowing they're doing it for something real. 

And Bucky didn't say no, when he asked.

With a new set of tires, his bike gets a clean bill of health, and he decides to give their relationship the same. 

**

For a week or two, Steve thinks about it, now and again, gauging whether his admission has put them under too much stress. Bucky doesn't seem changed by it, though. Except for a new habit of pulling on those tiny white shorts just when Steve is heading out to a long gym session, cheerfully waving him goodbye in such a diabolical combination of softly rumpled bedhead and latent lethal muscle that Steve's a little bit amazed every time he makes it home without braining himself distractedly on one of Sam's machines while dreaming about the flex of Bucky's glutes in a squat.

Fire, he decides eventually, can only be fought with fire, so he picks up a box of matches in the form of a t-shirt. Not that he doesn't wear tees on a daily basis, they're a sure-fire way to put himself and his clients at ease, but that's a uniform of thick, utilitarian cotton in an appropriately selected size. The one he tries on is … well, everything tends towards tight on him, but this is the difference between accidental shortfall in tailoring, and unequivocal declaration of intent. The fabric is thin enough to count his heartbeats through if you look closely, the hemline is a dangled promise of imminent bare midriff, the lines of the white star over his chest are warped by the stretch to accommodate his pecs, and yes that will do nicely. 

He puts it on for Sunday breakfast and Bucky pretends steadfastly not to notice as they lock up behind themselves and head out into the sunny morning. Bucky's still as skittish about touching in public as he was in the beginning, no matter how har he lets his guard down when they're behind closed doors, but he reaches up to tuck in the tag that probably wasn't protruding and let his fingers rest warmly for a moment.

"You better stick to your tea," Bucky tells him solicitously, patting his back. "Put a single strawberry inside of that thing and it might just bust a seam. Pretty sure those maple bacon pancakes would be the end of it."

"Oh no," Steve tells him brightly with a glance over his shoulder. "It's got plenty of give."

"Has it?" Bucky replies evenly, as if he hadn't noticed how every muscle on Steve's chest down to the second row of abdominals is outlined in shadowed cotton like an anatomy sketch.

By the time they reach the café, the lingering glances are making him crave a corner table, so of course Bucky snags one out front on the sidewalk, and leans back with his sunglasses on to watch the covert examinations and occasional double-takes of passers-by. There is only one possible response to that: Steve hooks his arm over the back of his seat, slouches, and basks in it. 

It's not as if he isn't used to being looked at, professionally, but no matter how lightly he wears it, he's always in costume, and the gaze is one he's in control of. Being the object of uninvited attention, it's as unnerving as it is electrifying, and there's a special piquancy in how Bucky is watching it, too, keenly interested. 

It takes him completely by surprise when Eva, who's been taking his Sunday breakfast order with a book-maker's precision for almost all of the months they've been coming here, looks him up and down openly, and says with a puzzled frown, "New haircut? Or did you change something with the --"

She waves her little tablet in the general direction of her everything.

Bucky laughs delightedly. "Nice work. We tip extra for attitude. He'll have the fruit salad, and I'm going for the maple bacon stack with tempura mushrooms on the side and a double espresso."

"Need the energy, huh?" She taps the order in, nodding sympathetically. "I can see you've got a lot to keep up with."

There's a cheeky, insinuating note in it that he's only caught glimpses of before, when Bucky's been in one of his mildly flirtatious moods. It's as if by putting on a tight shirt, Steve's given the world some kind of permission that extends to them both. 

"I am right here, you know."

"Mmm," she replies appreciatively. "Yes you are." 

Bucky's still laughing about his expression when their orders arrive, but it's hard to keep being sore at him when he pushes the pancake stack in Steve's direction and pops the strawberry off the top of the fruit salad into his own mouth, pulling the stem out wet and dropping it into his saucer. By the time they leave, Steve's brushed off meaningful glances from a handful of passers-by as well as the barista, and an open appraisal from a guy whose chihuahua stopped to take an interest in Steve's sneakers.

"Pretty sure I was exactly the same shape last week," he frowns when they're walking down the narrow unpaved path that cuts between the carpark and the old substation, towards the bypass.

"Sure," Bucky says with an audible grin. "But last week you didn't look like you wanted people to notice so bad." 

The whole weekend he's been like this, cheerfully at ease with the world, breezy and playful by turns, all while Steve's been watching him cautiously for signs of being spooked by the idea of a marriage proposal. 

"It's not a joke, pal," he teases back. "I get enough offers, I might just say yes to one of them, sooner or later." 

"Not a chance," Bucky laughs.

He turns back to object, but Bucky just looks at him darkly under his eyebrows. "You heard me. Not a fucking chance." 

Steve's heart gives a weird little twist in his chest, and he turns properly, walking backwards, to get it clear in his head. There's a hint of good-natured swagger to the way Bucky's walking, moving lightly on limbs made loose by dancing, no trace left of the menacing, perpetually withdrawing presence he remembers from when they met. And the sexiest thing of all is his confidence that Steve doesn't have eyes for anyone else. He's just looking at Steve like a gift he knows without question he's going to be unwrapping in a few short minutes, and Steve thinks yes, that confidence is everything he wanted. Maybe they don't need the symbolism of a ring after all. 

It changes in a second, but the moment stretches out in slow motion. 

Bucky's gaze shifts past Steve's shoulder, a veil of horror falling over his open face, just as Steve's heel hits the kerb and he stumbles. The bag of croissants goes flying, a confetti of almonds and powdered sugar trailing from it as Bucky's hand shoots out to clench his fingers in the neck of Steve's t-shirt and jerk him back with all the strength he has. The cotton burns the back of his neck and strains as he changes direction. Steve can feel it slam into him from behind, the whump of a heavy vehicle passing, so close that the slipstream whips his hair against his cheek and dust into his eyes.

Bucky's looking at him, ashen, his fingers still twisted in the ruined blue cotton. 

There's a numb moment's delay before it hits him, a weird concoction of fondness and lust, the meaning of what Bucky did, and the sheer panicked strength it took to do it. Steve doesn't get pushed around much these days. Practically nobody tries, and certainly no one succeeds. He wants Bucky so fiercely it hurts. 

But Bucky's pushing him away with a curse. "Idiot." It comes out strangled, despairing. "That's a fucking highway you're walking into backwards."

He stalks past, taking advantage of the break in traffic to jog across the road and cut through the gas station into their street. 

When they get home, he follows Bucky into their room and pulls him down onto the bed, too impatient to wait for a better moment. But if Bucky lets himself be manhandled, he's too keyed up for tenderness, and clearly too angry to lie still and be kissed on the face. 

"You don't get to do that," he growls, shoving at Steve's shoulder. "Not after what you pulled."

"I'm trying to say sorry—"

"Oh? Is that how you say sorry, is it? Doing whatever the hell you want?"

Steve swallows back the wounded retort he wants to make. It used to shock him, Bucky's anger, because it was so rare for him to express it, instead of turning his frustration in on himself and going silent. It's still rare enough to have power. 

"What do you want?" Steve asks meekly. 

Bucky's reply is a sigh of pure irritation, which probably means he still wants to strangle Steve a little. He turns his face away. It's awful, being tangled up with him, close enough to smell the stale coffee on his breath but feeling so distant from him. He can't let it go on.

He kisses Bucky's temple. "Wait for me." 

In the bathroom, he doesn't hurry, leaving plenty of time for Bucky's mood to cool down. When he steps out, there's music playing. It's got a beat, but you couldn't dance to it, unless it was arm in arm. Bucky's back on the bed when Steve drops his towel on the floor and straddles his hips.

"I hate being mad with you," Bucky tells him, reaching out with his eyes if not his hands. "So stop giving me good reasons to do it."

"Okay." Steve grinds down gently into the delicious friction of Bucky's denim against his naked thighs and ass. "Gonna let me make it up to you?"

Bucky answers in a glance and, at last, brings his hands up to squeeze Steve's waist, thumbs dragging up and down and digging in hard. 

"Tell me how I'm s'posed to stay mad with this?" His palms flatten and cling as they slide up Steve's chest, making free with every dip and bulge of muscle in the exact sort of objectification that Steve had in mind when he pulled that t-shirt off the shelf. 

He shifts forward onto one hand to grab the lube off the bedside table. Bucky's attention doesn't let up as Steve unbuttons his jeans, holding the tube in his teeth, and peels them down. It takes a couple of firm strokes to start channelling all that anger into something else. Bucky gets hard quickly, until Steve can shift on top of him, switch his hand round behind, and ease himself down. 

He didn't put too much effort into getting himself ready, so they could do it like this, excruciatingly tight, the muscle giving way fraction by fraction with each press of slick cockhead against his hole. Bucky's making soft, overwhelmed _oh_ noises underneath him and pressing his hips up for more, until Steve lets out a slow breath and presses down hard and – there – it's in him, and he can sink down that rod of hot flesh to the base. He lays his hands flat over Bucky's ribs and starts to grind down, easy.

"You're in charge of the sheets," Bucky mumbles, as if his brain had come online belatedly. 

"Okay," Steve tells him, squeezing down to make his eyes flutter. 

Bucky lies back and wallows in the pleasure of it, at first, lets Steve ride him slow and deep, nothing but the occasional involuntary jerk of his hips to show how good it feels. But when he starts to get close, when the intensity of it builds in him, he shoves Steve's hands aside so he can sit up, and the desire in Steve goes up like a lit gas puddle at that, the sudden friction of Bucky's hard belly against his dick and his hot mouth biting at Steve's neck and chest. He can't help the overwhelmed grunt that comes out of him, and since that makes Bucky nip him harder and suck with the whole of his hot, open mouth, he keeps up the noise while he shoves himself down tight and hard on Bucky's cock, and then – sweet mother of god – and then Bucky's hand closes tight around him and jerks. He's so close it's going to kill him, but he knows the rhythm of Bucky's grip because he taught it to him – he's tugging and pausing, just slow enough to keep him on edge. 

"Bucky—" he's whining, over and over. "C'mon, you know what I want."

"I got you, baby."

Something unloosens in Steve at that. The only time Bucky loses that guarded note of teasing and calls him _honey_ and _baby_ with perfect sincerity is when Steve's got him feeling so good that he doesn't know what's coming out of his mouth anymore. 

"Buck. I need—"

"Wait for me. Wait for me, baby."

Steve throws his head back, groaning, and rides Bucky's dick blindly, grinding up into his cruelly loose grip, and down onto his perfect hard cock, his chest overflowing with needy, deep sounds. And then they're there, and Bucky's all wet inside him, and his fingers are stripping Steve with the strength he needs at last, until he goes off like a firework in between them.

It's blinding, hard and quick, shivering through him like a current, and then it's gone, and he's holding Bucky against him with a grip that's maybe fiercer than it should be, now that the chase is over. But Bucky bears it placidly, until his dick softens enough to slip free.

With a noise of disgust, he breaks Steve's hold easily and flops back on the pillow.

"You're on clean-up," he says, and folds both arms over his face, which as it happens opens up a dreamy view of the sculpted muscle across his chest, the neat curls of hair in his armpits, and the geometric ink that clads his left arm up to the shoulder, the zigzag of interlaced fall leaves for endings and beginnings that covers up the marks of his prison term. 

"Yeah," Steve says serenely. "I've got it."

They never do say anything else about the morning's brush with mortality, but mid-afternoon his phone pings with an invitation that fills up his free night on Thursday, two weeks away.

"We're having dinner?"

Bucky gives him a challenging look. "After the stunt you pulled today, you're buying."

"I guess I am."

It plays on his mind for those two weeks, the thought of a dinner they had to make reservations for. He has a feeling about that dinner. He buys a new pair of shoes – a shade of mahogany with a dapper point to them that couldn't be further from his usual black – and finds himself counting down the days.

He's not wrong. When Bucky turns to him on the sidewalk outside that bookstore and says he wants to get married, Steve's heart's beating so fast he has to walk them up to the cinema and back before he feels safe to get back on the bike. By the time they get home, he wants to eat Bucky alive, but it turns out to be one of those nights Bucky wants to run things and he's got no argument at all with lying back and letting Bucky's capable hands make him feel like a treasured possession.

The next day, he can't let Bucky out of arm's reach, and Bucky puts up with it tolerantly until late-afternoon when he remembers an errand he has to run and pulls out a loose hoodie that covers up most of what Steve's done to him. 

After that, there's a week he can't look at Bucky without remembering afresh and getting a little jolt of half-disbelieving excitement in his chest. There's a few more weeks after that of late nights poring over jewellery websites, then casually presenting a carefully chosen design over breakfast, setting his phone down between the sugar bowl and the empty waffle plate, only for Bucky to look at him like he'd never expected there'd be precious metals involved and say, "Sure," uncertainly, then again real soft, "Yeah."

His poor clients find themselves lavished with tenderness, whether it's written into their client profile or not. It's Belle who shrewdly turns back to Bucky as she's walking out the door and says, "Whatever you did to him, you got my permission to keep on doing it."

"Sure thing, m'am. As often as he'll let me." Bucky winks at her, and thirty seconds later lets Steve tackle him onto the sofa, fending off kisses with the palm of his hand until he can get his laughter under control.

**

On the day of the ceremony, Steve's on a mission, and the mission is perfection. He makes eggs on toast with fried mushrooms, two serves just the right size for a burst of energy without the decline into stuffed lethargy, and squeezes out a dozen oranges with the new silver juicer, and carries it into the bedroom on a tray. Later, he trims and combs, touching up the barber's work from two days ago with a snip here and there. In a moment of piercing foresight, he changes the sheets on the bed Bucky's vacated and folds them back, dusts the side tables, tidies the stray socks and shirts into the laundry basket, and lays out glasses of water, trying not to think too hard about how it's going to be when they tumble in here afterwards, wondering whether it will feel different, wondering whether he wants it to.

Bucky watches it all with an air of faint bemusement concealing his usual sniper focus. Steve's on the doorstep frowning at the slow-moving rideshare app on his phone when Bucky leans into him and says, low, "Remember the rings?"

Horror drains his face for an instant, before Bucky pats his pocket and pulls the little blue velvet pouch out of it, smiling tolerantly and leaning up to kiss Steve's jaw, unruffled, as if Steve had absorbed all the tension out of them both. 

By the time they're standing in front of the celebrant, his heart's racing as if an earthquake or law change or meteor strike was about to snatch this moment away from him. He feels Bucky's fingers brush against his, lightly at first, then the pinky deliberately curling around his pointer finger. Something they never do, holding hands. He glances at Bucky, who's looking steadily back at him, that bemused gleam still in his eye, as if to say _jeez, ain't this a lot of fuss over nothing?_

His voice goes deep, though, when he says, "I do."

It does feel different, kissing Bucky for the first time as a married man. It's only a chaste press of their lips, lingering one heartbeat or two, but when they do it, there's an invisible tether between them now, a few seconds old and already stronger than the anchor of Bucky's hand at his waist. The urgency that dogged his heels all morning has vanished. The tiny veins of doubt that always ran through his certainty have gone. 

He kisses Bucky again, when they find the foyer momentarily empty, his one hand cupping his cheek. Temptation opens up like a pit under his toes, the urge to make a spectacle of how good a match they are. 

"Keep it together," Bucky murmurs to him as he puts a sliver of space between them, then adds with an uncharacteristic growl. "And take me home." 

Steve does.

**

By late afternoon, they've finally satisfied their hunger for each other. Steve's slumped against the headboard feeling like he ran all his week's gym sessions in a row, with ouzo shots in between. Bucky's out cold, stretched toward the foot of the bed, his left arm with the sleeve tattoo and the shoulder injury tucked protectively under his belly, and the other arm curled in front of him. The restful lines of his body look sculpted. He couldn't be more defenceless. He doesn't even twitch when Steve strokes the sole of his foot. 

One thought pulls the moment back from perfection. He can't help thinking about all those years he missed out on, when Bucky's character was being formed, when he was building up his body into the shape it has now. When Bucky needed him. For just a second, his heart aches with the thought that they've wasted too much time. So much of the curiosity and potential of youth – the eager vulnerability to every small thing – is behind them already. They don't have long enough. 

Then he looks that fear square-on and turns it into a promise. They're going to make it long enough. He's going to work at it every day.

As he watches Bucky breathe softly in and out, the afternoon crystallises into a moment so vivid he wants to capture it in a photo. Since his phone is in his pants, he reaches for his sketch pad instead. He writes the date in the corner and roughs in the first soft lines of Bucky's back. 

**

On the Saturday after the ceremony, they have lunch with Bucky's mom and dad. Since the divorce, they've crossed paths enough times at the birthdays of Becca's children that it's not too uncomfortable to have them both together. They sit a careful distance apart, though, and don't react, at first, when Bucky breaks the news to them over freshly poured champagne. 

"I'm happy for you both," Winifred says after a while. "I hoped it might be that sort of news, when I got your message." 

She looks down, watching the bubbles break the surface of her glass in silence for a while.

"It was real small, Ma."

"We would have been happy to be there," she says, still looking at her glass. "Doesn't matter how small."

Bucky leans towards her, voice going soft. "That's why you're here now. It was only on Wednesday. We wanted – I wanted to tell you first." He drops his gaze after a moment, brow heavy. "I couldn't make it all about me. I did enough of that when I was a kid."

"It was only the two of us," Steve says. "In a back office in City Hall." 

"Well you can have your honeymoon in Maui, with the money that would have saved you," George says, popping the last of the chorizo arancini balls in his mouth. "Smart choice."

Perched awkwardly on the sofa arm, Bucky's father has a bit of the swagger of Bucky at his most confident, and none of his vulnerability, cynical enough that Steve isn't sure yet whether there's kindness under it all. His persistent silence, in between the deflecting humour, makes him seem like someone whose confidence in the world has been shaken. Steve reminds himself that George was the man, once, who poured the family's finances into legal expenses in an attempt to save his son from prison.

Steve fetches more of those arancini balls while Bucky talks about the reasons they haven't really planned any kind of honeymoon. When he puts them on the table, Winifred is telling a story about a friend's daughter whose disastrous honeymoon, ruined by an early start to the hurricane season, turned out to be the foundation for a resilient marriage and the conception of the first of four children.

"Well I guess I should see the ring then," she says afterwards. "Not yours."

She holds out her hand towards Steve, so he leaves off the box of cheese straws he was opening and comes over to submit it for inspection. When she takes his hand, it gives him another one of those shivers of old memory, to be touched with that combination of gentleness, authority and – he thinks, maybe – love. 

Their rings are the same stepped design, one upraised band of hammered platinum grading down into two smooth tiers on either side. Roughness flanked by two flawless, shining bands. She runs the pad of her thumb over the textured edges where the hammered planes meet each other in an almost geometric whole. She nods twice. 

"Congratulations."

At the other end of the sofa, George is talking about new additions to his fish pond. 

"You said you were expecting this?" Steve asks her softly.

She brushes it off with a shrug and releases his hand.

"Why?"

For a while it looks like she's going to change the subject. She picks up her glass and drains the last sip from it, then cradles it loosely in one hand. "He never could help pulling people in. But the ones he holds onto, he doesn't let go easily." Her pained look smooths into something lighter. "And you – your face doesn't hide a lot. You know that?"

That makes Steve smile in self-deprecation. "Yeah, he's told me that. Once or twice." 

He glances at her empty glass. It's a deliberately casual gathering, easy finger food, nothing like the carefully planned banquet Steve would have done his best to put together for his new in-laws. Bucky, however, had vetoed every suggestion that might have tied his parents to the apartment for one second long than they wanted to stay. And yet they're both still here, and if he pours a second glass as big as the first, Winifred won't want to drive any time soon.

"Can I get you another one?"

She looks at him, considering. "Thanks." 

It's mid-afternoon, they're down to the last reserves of dips and crackers that Steve had optimistically laid in, and he's spent more than half an hour learning about the unbelievable complexities and contradictions in the state's parole system that George's prisoner support group has to navigate, when the buzzer sounds. 

George is on his feet before Steve can react. "You take it easy. I can get that." 

There's voices in the corridor outside. He can feel Bucky tense up, whole body drawing solid as a fortress, the way Steve equates with fear or distress and has got too used to not seeing. George holds open the door and through it walks a handsome woman in dark jeans, a black jacket and a capacious high-end handbag.

Bucky's wound up so tight Steve's not even sure he's breathing. Everyone in the room seems frozen. Steve's nerves are attuned to it, now, the rawness in the family, the years of accumulated guilt concealing tender wounds. Impulsively, he reaches across the corner of the coffee table for Bucky's hand. To his surprise, Bucky lets him, and squeezes back for an instant, fiercely, then lets him go.

"Hi Bec," Bucky says in that hoarse tone that means he's getting close to the limits of his resilience. 

"Mom, I left my headphones in the car."

Following after her mother, the girl in the sports uniform and functional dark brown braid looks up and stops, with a smile for her grandmother. 

"You won't need them, Lil. This is your uncle James I told you about." She puts a hand on her daughter's shoulder. "This is Lily. Jack's on the other side of town taking a class." She's talking brusquely, as if seeking comfort in facts, and hasn't moved more than three steps into the room. "You must be Steve."

She has the same air of matter-of-fact competence that Bucky does, he thinks as he crosses the room to kiss her cheek and tell her how pleased he is to meet her at last. 

"I'm really glad you came," he adds.

If she picks the end of the sofa farthest from Bucky, she chats politely to Steve about the same thing everyone does, the history of the building and the work he had to put in to make this corner of it waterproof and stable. They stick to the safe topic of home renovations for a while, with George chipping in details about his new garden beds.

By the time she's gotten a drink under her belt and is helping him wash empty glasses while the kettle boils, she's laughing a little, and he thinks the mood might have shifted enough to bring it up. She was in college when Bucky's misfortunes began, at a point in life when they were maybe growing in different directions in any case. When legal costs made money tight, he's gathered that she had to switch to a cheaper course closer to home, so maybe there's resentment there too. 

"It would mean a lot to him," he starts softly, "if there was a way to patch it up between you."

She blinks as if startled and puts a champagne flute up on the shelf with a clunk. "No one made him throw away his education for the party scene," she says, speaking low, with the well-rehearsed articulation of long-nursed grievances. "He broke Dad's heart when he dropped out of college, and again when he fell in with those people. He was the one who decided to follow that raging narcissist Jesse into everything. And it's not like the risks weren't obvious. He made choices – him and no one else." She takes the dripping plate direct from his hand and dries it busily. "Look, I'm not trying to get you caught up in all this shit from the past. If it seems like no big deal to you, that's great. But it's a big deal for me. Did he tell you he wouldn't even let them visit? You don't know how hard that was on Mom."

Picking up the dips platter, he takes his time digging the sponge into all its little crevices, feeling his way with care.

"He couldn't have reasons for that? Why don't you ask him?"

She shakes her head, straightening the glasses on the shelf for something to do. "What would that change?"

Before Steve can work out an answer, she switches tack. "Pretty sure he doesn't need us anyway," she says, brighter, glancing over her shoulder. "Looks like he came out of it okay."

Steve's heart clenches like a fist in his chest. For a moment he can't even get the air to reply to her. She looks up and blanches a little, and she must read some of it in his face, how he feels every scar on Bucky's skin and counts every second of joy he lost in that place, and in the months after he came out too. Her expression opens up softly, and suddenly that's more than he can bear. 

"I think he's the strongest person I've ever met," Steve tells her thickly, looking at the greying water as he tries to blink the surge of emotion back under control. It takes a few moments to ease, before he manages a tight smile. "I might be biased though." 

After a moment, she flicks him gently with the towel. 

"You'd better be biased," she tells him with a soft smirk just like Bucky's. "It's part of your wedding vows." 

They've gotten to the cutlery before he hears Lily ask, in a child's resonant whisper,

"Nana, can I get a tattoo? Next birthday?"

The conversation stops and everyone turns. Bucky flips his arm over and looks at it as if surprised, then grins. "Took about six hours and set me back more than a thousand bucks," he tells her. "And that's not even getting started on the pain. You know what I'd say? Start small and see if you like it first." 

"She's seven," Rebecca tells him severely. 

"Maybe a unicorn then," he replies with a provoking lilt that Steve can instantly see would have driven a sibling up the wall. "Work up to the dragons and snakes later."

She shakes her head in exasperation, but there's a smile in it too.

When they're out on the street saying goodbye, she lets Steve pull her into a hug this time. "I'm glad he's got someone looking out for him," she says, holding him against her for a moment. "He always needed it."

"Leave it alone, will you?" Bucky tells him wearily, once the apartment is empty and they're changing clothes for their shifts at the club. "She's right. I did fuck it up. She doesn't have to make it up now and tell me it's all okay." 

He picks distractedly at a loose thread on his shirt, then goes out to hunt around in the kitchen drawer for some scissors. Steve follows him, leans at the other end of the sink, and watches him pull at his collar to get another look at that thread.

"Tell me about Jesse." 

Bucky strips off the shirt to trace the thread back to its source under the collar and spares him a warning glance. "We were – we used to hang out a lot. For a year or so. Did everything together, as a matter of fact." 

"Everything?" Steve can't help asking.

"Okay, not everything. He was too busy screwing his way through every pretty girl he ever met." 

"And what were you doing?" 

He pinches the thread in his fingertips to pull it taut and slides the scissor blades with surgical precision to snip it at its source. "Same thing, I guess. Playing around a bit. Wondering how come it all seemed so easy. But the music was the whole point of it, for me. There's nothing like it for taking you away from it all. Not just a way to get laid." Steve lets it rest, waits out the pause. Bucky's hands lower until the crumpled shirt is resting against the sink. "I missed him more than anyone, I think. He wrote me twice. Once during the trial – had to keep his distance from all that, because he'd been buying from the same people I did, even dealing a little. The second time was after I went in. He asked if I wanted him to come visit. I thought about that – there was too much time for thinking, in that place. I thought about the way he asked. What that meant." 

Steve can tell from the silence that Bucky never replied to that question.

It's a couple of steps to slide in behind him, tangle their left hands with the rings on together and use his other arm to pull Bucky back tightly against him. It was the right thing to do, he's certain of it in his head now, the way he only felt it in his gut before. It was important for them both stand up together in front of a registered official and promise to make it last forever. Bucky leans back into his embrace, even if he never quite loses the heaviness.

"C'mon," he tells Steve after a while, squirming gently. "Two hundred olives ain't going to skewer themselves before opening."

Steve makes a questioning noise, as if the science wasn't quite settled on that point, and kisses his ear, and lets him go.

**

"That was quick," Natasha observes drily about two minutes after she walks into their dressing room.

He leans back in the chair and looks at the ring he's going to be wearing under his leather gloves for the first time tonight. It feels anything but quick. For a moment, all he can see is the distance he and Bucky had to cross to get here, the patience and trust it took, the constant caution, all the setbacks that could have broken them apart. The man Bucky put that ring on isn't even the Steve Rogers of a year ago. He's firmly grounded, with a heart that feels wide open, bursting with a spring of tenderness he wants to shower the world in.

Natasha squeezes his shoulders. She kisses the top of his head. "Congratulations. You both deserve to be happy."

Fighting back surprise, he smiles at her reflection, blinking. "Thanks. We would have asked you to be there. But it was just him and me."

She pulls a face at that. "You missed out on the party then. I'm putting on drinks after we close up. Say yes."

Just before he says no, he pictures Bucky gruffly fending off congratulations from all the staff he's slipped free drinks to after a bad night, or helped out with equipment failures, faintly pink and secretly pleased. 

"Yeah. Okay."

The door opens, spilling in music from the bar downstairs, and the man himself comes in. With sleeves rolled up over his muscled forearms, and a dish towel trailing from his back pocket, the competent energy of him hits Steve with the same force as ever, but now there's a new shell of contentment around that feeling, because it's his, all his.

"Woah," Nat says, stepping back and taking her hands off his shoulders. "One look at him and you're a marshmallow. Those muscles were like rocks when I kissed you before." She grabs the drink Bucky offers her, something clear over three cubes of ice, and nods at him. "Congratulations. You're a magician. I did not know that was possible."

Steve takes the tall glass Bucky holds out for him, sips it and frowns. 

"What's that face?" Bucky says, already on his way out again. "It's the first vitamin you've eaten since breakfast, so you can damn well drink your tomato juice straight." He pauses in the doorway and turns back to Natasha, utterly casual. "And you. If you're gonna kiss him again, save it for sometime I can sit back and watch."

Steve just busies himself with his tomato juice, as if it could hide how his heart just went from marshmallow to cotton candy.

Natasha's not the only one who thinks it's quick, he finds out when the night's work's done and the bar is bursting with music and kink practitioners buzzed on free drinks. Apparently they'd kept it so quiet that practically no one saw this coming. But it's been more than a year since Bucky started working for him, maybe even a year since they got together, depending on when you date it from. Steve doesn't have a clear starting point, since in his mind it was more of a shift from being one sort of team to another. But now he has a date. Wednesday, three days ago.

He can't help searching Bucky out among the crowd, and finds him talking to T'Challa about something serious looking. As if he can feel Steve's attention, his gaze lifts up and he scans the room until their eyes lock. He smiles immediately, followed by a wry look, as if to say _ain't this a lot of fuss over nothing,_ and Steve can feel himself grinning back, his heart naked in his eyes. 

**

There are moments where married life feels different, looking at himself in the mirror before his shower, bare except for that metal band hugging his ring finger, thinking he might never be completely naked from now until his grave, and other times, passing Bucky a hasty sandwich scrounged together between client appointments, where it really doesn't at all.

It could be a couple of months later when he calls Bruce to see if he can sit down with someone from the legal department to get some direction on who's responsible for the water leak that seems to be coming from under the pavement outside. 

"Hey, and why don’t you drop in and see me when you're done?" Bruce says once he's given Steve a name and number. "It's about time we caught up."

Something almost indiscernible in his tone says the "we" means Steve and only Steve.

It's almost a week before his meeting, and he spends a little of that time pushing away doubts. They always knew his cashflow would be tighter once he bought the building, but they're never extravagant in their spending, and the only money Bucky's siphoning off these days is the fund for Rebecca's children, which she still hasn't agreed to accept. 

And it can't be – Bucky's been running his books for more than a year, and he's never had a single moment's hesitation about that. He trusts Bucky with everything he has. 

He ends up arriving early, and sticking his head around Bruce's office door before his meeting starts.

"Hi Steve," Bruce says, and his easy smile says that, whatever it is, it's okay.

"Look, I don't want to make things awkward," he begins when Steve's taken a seat. "But I thought you ought to know." He taps his pen on his notepad a couple of times and puts it down. "I offered James a position here. The salary isn't a lot more than what he makes behind the bar and there's no tips, but a company like this can offer practically any opportunity he can think of." He's been watching Steve carefully while he speaks. "He didn't tell you? I thought it might be like that. I just can't figure out what's stopping him. He's a natural deal-closer, but he hasn't even come back with a counter-offer." 

"What did he say?" 

"Actually, he was very determined to deflect the question." Bruce frowns deeply, making Steve realise that he hasn't previously had any reason to become acquainted with the stubborn side of Bucky. "And then he stopped returning my messages."

"Is the offer still open?" 

"Sure. But he'd better decide soon. The next intake for the training course closes off at the end of the month. It's only debt recovery to start with, but even for that there's some basics he needs to get on top of." 

He leaves with a lighter heart than he arrived with, and the knowledge that the water leak is entirely the local authority's problem.

It turns out Bucky has a lot of different reasons for turning down the job offer, and none of them are any good.

"I caught up with Bruce today. Before my meeting."

Bucky's fingers go still over the keyboard, but it's a while before he looks up, sullen already.

"You know what he told me?" Steve asks.

"Yeah, I know." He tilts his chin out, mulish as a five-year-old. "And?"

Steve shucks his jacket and hangs it on the rack, and comes back calm. 

"He doesn't understand why he hasn't heard back from you."

"Doesn't he?" 

The expression Bucky turns on him is provoking, his eyes turned up in challenge, the whites showing underneath his pupils and his long mouth insolently twisted. It's that bratty streak Steve had sensed in him long ago, finally turned up to full volume. Deep down, he knows he's seeing Bucky as he almost never does, bitterly defending a questionable position. But at the same time, it gets him hot under the collar, tugging unfairly on all his professional instincts. 

"The reason he doesn't understand, Steve," Bucky tells him with cool, exaggerated articulation. "Is that he never asked what I went down for, or how long I was in. All he asked was, was it any kind of dishonesty or fraud, and did I get my high school diploma. That's what he calls due diligence on an employee with a criminal record. He's just a dreamer. A bit like you."

Steve ignores the personal jab and reminds himself that the only time Bucky gets nasty is when he's scared, really scared. "He's been running million-dollar accounts for more than a decade, Buck." 

Bucky shoves the laptop aside, as if he might want to get up and pace.

"I don't want to work with assholes. I'm not going to be some sort of corporate yes man, either. You know I'm not cut out for that. I do people more good mixing them drinks in the bar." 

It's actually painful, to hear that. "You're too smart for that, Buck."

Bucky stands up, breathing hard for a few moments as if he wants to throw a punch, but the anger melts off him with a sigh. He shrugs and closes the few steps between them.

"Look," he says, in a wholly different tone. "I'm glad you've got my back. I'm lucky." He leans up and kisses Steve's mouth, nipping lightly at his bottom lip, and Steve's knees go to jelly in an instant because nothing gets him going like that switch in Bucky, from potent to sweet, with the sweetness that's all for Steve and no one else. Bucky kisses him again, mouth softly open. "But if you think I'm so smart? How about you trust me to decide what kind of person writes my paychecks?"

Then he's got his arms looped around Steve's neck like some romance movie heroine, and they're kissing for real. 

"Bucky," he says, pleading a little as the high ground vanishes beneath his feet. "Bucky, the third biggest professional services firm in the city has to write a pretty neat paycheck, don't you think?"

"Yeah," Bucky tells him, running his fingers down Steve's arms with a light touch that makes him shiver. "The benefits don't match what I get here though. Not even close."

Then his hands are under Steve's shirt and the argument gets shelved for good.

**

They do go on a honeymoon in the end, even if they both carefully call it a vacation.

Bucky has a few busy weeks at work, his days off eaten up by extra shifts and a touring exhibition on home renovation. It's not that Steve can't look after himself, since he did it perfectly well for all the years before they met, and a lot of those years he was doing jobs much more hazardous to his mental health than the one he has now. 

But somehow his sketches won't finish themselves when Bucky's away. The vegetable crisper develops a layer of limp carrots and wilted lettuce in bags. He watches one of those dramas about drug gangs to pass the time, and then another, violent ones where everyone's a crook, even the cops, and he knows that happy endings aren't what audiences want these days, and bad guys on TV aren't guaranteed to get their come-uppance any more than they do in the real world, but he can't seem to stop watching them, sick to the stomach and hoping. 

One of them is playing from the projector up on the wall, while he dozes to the monotony of raised voices and fists connecting with flesh, when Bucky comes in the door and throws on the overhead lights. Steve blinks and rubs his eyes under a suddenly critically gaze.

"I've never been to Vegas," Bucky says as he drops his pack and throws his jacket over the sofa arm. "Take a week off and we'll go."

Then he bends down to undo his boots, a routine action that has the same erotic effect on Steve as the rolling of a black lace stocking down a thigh.

"Sure," Steve tells him. "Anywhere you want."

They do stupid tourist things, like turning their faces into the drifting gold-spangled spray from the Bellagio fountain, and making dumb finger pistols at each other around every corner on the way back from the mob museum. The scale of the mighty water reserve, and the throbbing midday heat, leave them hushed with awe the day they go out to the Hoover Dam. There's a bus tour, and a neighbourhood full of bright murals, and a graveyard for neon signs in every shade of pink, red and orange in the spectrum. 

But the thing that takes his breath away is how Bucky lights up in the new city. There's another layer of history that comes off him. He lounges over chairs and flirts knowingly with every single waitress and clerk who serves them, teasing Steve mercilessly through his eyelashes every time. It's like the whole world has become an extension of the dance floor where the weight comes off him and he flies. 

They take a cheap room well off the Strip, and gamble small change at a different casino every night, and then look for night clubs with no cover charge that make up in coloured lights and sheer human noise what they lack in musical sophistication.

He really thought he'd seen Bucky at his happiest, but as they head into the second week he has to recalibrate that scale completely because some days he's practically luminous.

Most mornings, they wake up after nine and hang out the "do not disturb" sign so they can take their time with each other. The second last of those mornings, he gets Bucky lying back in a pool of boneless satisfaction and props himself up on his elbow to drink in the flush of his mouth and the loveliness of his face at rest. 

"What?" Bucky asks him, eyes slitting open. "I still got glitter in my hair or something?"

Steve turns his face down, trying not to give voice to all the corny things he's thinking, but he's a bit giddy with pleasure himself, all his powers of self-censorship stripped away, and Bucky knows him too well now to be fobbed off with his protest that it's nothing. 

"What? Steve?"

He bites his lip and lets himself say it. "This. Is this what you used to be like? Before everything?"

For a moment, Bucky goes withdrawn and still, but then fondness washes over his face like a slow wave.

"Yeah, maybe a bit," he replies softly. "Very high maintenance though. And so much attitude. No fucking idea how good I had it. You wouldn't have liked that kid, Steve."

When Steve kisses his forehead with a contradictory sound, all he does is laugh, clear and easy. "Oh, that's how it is, huh? Maybe you're just a bit too interested in how I looked at nineteen."

But it's not that, not exactly. The harder Steve tries to pin it down and put it in words, the worse it aches. He tries to squash it away, that feeling of too muchness, his heart dragged outside his chest, beating raw in the air between them, but if feels like the only way out is to say it.

"It eats me up sometimes. If I could go back and stop it happening. You've got such a good heart, Buck. It wouldn't have taken much to point you in the right direction." 

Bucky doesn't even look sad. Just shifts so they're facing properly and does that thing where he thumbs the worry lines off Steve's forehead, and gently cups his cheek, stroking just under the bone. 

"Don't do it, honey. It's a bottomless pit, the what-ifs. You gotta let it be." His caress stills itself. "It all turned out okay in the end, didn’t it? I'm not going to say it was worth it. If I could ever get those years back again, I'd do it. But I'd find you anyway. There'd have to be a way."

Steve feels that go off in his heart like a flare. Then he grins like an idiot, and kisses Bucky with his idiot grin, does it again and again while Bucky laughs and lies back and lets him. 

He hadn't known Bucky felt that same sense of inevitability about them, the same certainty that there was no one else. Now he knows.

When he's left off and settled for tucking his head contentedly under Bucky's chin, he's interrupted by fingers prodding the sensitive flesh of his flank. 

"Hey. You think your job's all done? When my caffeine levels are down to critical and that bakery on the next block is probably almost sold out of lemon tarts by now?"

He good-naturedly peels himself away, kissing his way down as far as Bucky's navel before he crawls back off the bed and heads for the shower. 

Examining himself in the mirror, his eyes are lined with the mild dehydration of a bit too much beer and way too much fucking, and his hair is a lank disgrace, but the face that looks back at him is happy.

"You know I'm gonna make you pay for every crumb of it when I get back, Buck," he calls out.

He listens to the sounds of Bucky rolling far enough out of bed to pull his phone off the charger then settling back into the sweaty snarl of bedsheets. 

"Every crumb?" Bucky repeats cheerfully. "All right. Better get me two then."

**


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Damn it. The promises they made each other in the registrar's office were pretty general. Maybe they extend to Steve having an equal claim on Bucky's family, and maybe they don't.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think this is the actual end this time, these last two chapters. Final chapter will be up before New Year. 
> 
> Bucky works on reconnecting with family, and gets a new job, and shepherds their marriage through some rough patches. Since the beginning, this has been a story about finding middle ground, and a relationship measured by what each of them was willing to give up. Just saying, the rough patches get pretty rough when Bucky's past catches up with him.

Bucky's sweeping a few days of brick dust down the corridor and out into the street when he hears his phone ring inside. Uncharacteristically, Steve answers it. 

Even through the wall, he can hear the pleasure and the extra note of courtesy that means it's his mom. He keeps sweeping and lets them chat for a while, since it's one of those days he's more comfortable with achievable tasks than with the complexities of people, so he's more than happy for Steve to sub in for him in the role of dutiful son. The conversation goes on for a while before Steve brings the phone out to him. He sits on the step with the sun on his face and takes it. He gets a few minutes of everyday updates before Winifred casually mentions that his niece is celebrating her eighth birthday the weekend after next, drops a quick anecdote about her neighbour's rowdy late-night card games, and signs off.

"Are you going to send her something?" Steve asks, stacking dried dishes and acting off-handed, a few moments after Bucky comes back inside.

"Probably not."

He only manages to hold himself back a couple of seconds. "Bet she'd like it."

"Her mother wouldn't. The kid's only met me once anyway. She won't notice one way or the other."

Steve isn't dissuaded any more than Bucky expected. He goes on with his industrious tidying, clattering as he goes. "Just say you sent her a doll or something. What's the worst that could happen? Buck?"

The weather is bright, the house full of drifting breeze, there's a bunch of poppies on the coffee table from their early morning's market run, Steve is irrepressibly sunny, and Bucky has had all he can take. 

"Just stay out of it, will you?" The bark in his voice is unintentional, but he can't help it if it feels like being caught in an ambush. "You weren't there. You don't know what it was like for them."

Between one cup and the next, Steve goes still. He flattens his hand against the sink, hunching slightly. 

"I've got stuff to do," Bucky tells him, just to break that awful silence. "I'll be back in time for your clients."

Steve doesn't say anything back.

It's only when he's sitting in his ride, replaying that whole stressful conversation in his head, that he can start to make sense of it – especially Steve's sudden, weird silence at the end. _You don't know what it was like,_ Bucky had told him, which is patently true, given how easily Steve makes excuses for the idiot kid he used to be, that presumptuous asshole taking his charmed life and his parents' unconditional love for granted. But Steve does know what it's like to lose people. And the people Steve's lost are never coming back to him. Damn it. The promises they made each other in the registrar's office were pretty general. Maybe they extend to Steve having an equal claim on Bucky's family, and maybe they don't. But either way, it's not the kind of thing he can say no to, now that he's glimpsed how badly Steve wants it. He's going to have to put some work in.

But he's got a backpack full of tools and a task to accomplish, first. In his pocket is the spare key to the apartment he used to rent, but he doesn't need it because the door handle turns at his touch. Its sub-tenant is out cold, in a nest of untucked sheets, on the mattress that Bucky himself used to sleep on. It's two in the afternoon.

"Daniel," he tries. "Hey! Oscar."

With a sigh, he turns to the sink, which is piled up with what must be every dish in the place and a stack of old pizza boxes on top of that. He can hear it from here, the leak that the kid is blaming for the painfully high water bill Bucky received last week. It sounds like it's been going on for a while and steadily getting worse. 

He kicks aside the worn-through lawn chairs that are leaning against the boiler and turns it off, then bends down under the sink to switch the water supply off too, and that's when the kid finally coughs in his sleep and wakes. 

"Rise and shine," Bucky says over his shoulder. "Your maintenance crew is here."

Behind him, the kid rolls into his blanket pile with muffled curses. Bucky stands up and waits for his head to emerge from under the pillow. He's no longer the fresh-faced kid who saved up all his spare change and travelled a hundred miles on the bus for an hour of Steve's touch. He looks sunken-eyed, and bad lifestyle choices have drained some of the puppy fat from his cheeks. Bucky's not going to pretend he doesn't recognise the symptoms. 

"You look rough, kid. When was the last time you ate something that wasn't fried?"

Daniel just groans. "The fuck? What time is it?"

Bucky shifts pizza boxes until he unearths a half-empty water bottle and chucks it at him. "Come over here and watch this, because I'm not doing it again. It cost me 25 bucks to get out here."

"You could send Steve next time," the kid manages, sitting up bare-chested, his lips pink and wet from the water.

"You think he'll be a soft touch for that kind of attitude, do you?" Bucky scoffs with more confidence than he actually feels on this topic. "Steve's been doing his own home maintenance since he was twelve. Now get over here."

He doesn't know if that's literally true, but with an absentee father, his mom sick for years before the illness that carried her off, and his insatiable urge to _help,_ it's probably close. Anyway, it works. Daniel drags a shirt out from the bedclothes and puts it on, while Bucky shifts the contents of the sink onto the floor to make space.

"Matter of fact, you can do it yourself," Bucky says, passing over the screwdriver and wrench from his bag. "See the screw in the middle there? Take that off first. That's it. Give it here – I'll look after it. Now take the valve off gently – hang on." Remembering what a hard time he had changing the cold tap when he moved in here, he pulls the can of WD-40 out of his pack and sprays it. "You got some of this? You can keep this one. Try again." This time it comes away cleanly, exposing a washer that is clearly warped and shrunken on one side. To his credit, the kid can immediately see what to do when Bucky passes him a replacement, and a couple of minutes later it's all back in one functional piece.

He's not a bad kid, not really. He just lacks the strength of character to withstand the temptations of coming out in a big city with an income too patchy to maintain a party lifestyle, and no support from his disapproving family back home. 

Switching everything back on, Bucky starts to fill the sink. When he hooks the bottom drawer out with his toe, that red and white dish towel is still sitting exactly where he left it. Turns out the kid knows what to do with that, too, once Bucky makes him pick it up.

"Steve ever tell you what I did before I met him?" he asks while the worst of the dishes are soaking.

Daniel gives him a sullen look. "Bartender."

"Yeah, and before that, I did twelve years for possession, dealing and aggravated battery. And you know how I got there? The same road you're walking, pal." He pulls a bowl to the surface and starts to scrub. "So when I tell you that if you've turned this place back into a dump when I come back here next month, I'm gonna throw you out on your ear, you better believe I can do it."

The kid dries the bowl with practised thoroughness, even as he scowls.

"I got people I can stay with," he says. "I got friends."

"Everyone's your friend when they got a heart full of love drugs. You can't rely on those kind of people." Bucky dumps the cutlery in a foamy pile and turns to look him in the eye. "You gotta rely on yourself first, kid. Trust me. Get your head in the right place, and then you'll see who's your friend and who just likes to have a crowd around them. You got a job, don'tcha? That's a start."

It's only a mid-week cleaning shift at a big block of serviced offices, but it seems like he can hold his own there, so they talk about that until the place is back in order and the garbage all stuffed in black plastic bags outside the door.

"One month," Bucky tells him sternly. "I'll give you a fifty dollar discount on the rent if I'm not ashamed of how it looks." The kid looks like a kicked puppy, so he adds, "And I'm bringing Steve with me, so you'd better make it good."

Predictably, his face lights up with hope.

By the time Bucky gets home, it's just a few minutes until the first client, and way too precarious a moment to bring up the morning's falling out.

He holds onto it through a long evening. Will's up first, full of beans this week and eager to give Steve a few bratty reasons to wipe that grin off his face. After that, Steve just has time to wash up and drink a quiet tea, leaning against the sink, before Emma arrives, needing to be treated extra gently with her eldest in the early stages of what sounds like an eating disorder and her workplace laying people off. And then it's another wrenching shift of gears for Kieran, whose single-minded fetish for cock-worship tests all the boundaries Steve's tried to put in place on his work since the two of them got together. 

When Steve comes back from showing Kieran to the door, he looks wrecked. The air of command he wears like a battle helmet when he's in his Dom persona has come off.

The music Bucky put on is just starting up, classical like Steve prefers after his sessions, soothing violins with warm brass ascending in the background. Bucky settles back on the sofa, with a bowl of chilli peanuts on the arm beside him and a fluffy blanket over his lap, so that Steve can do exactly what he does, which is collapse his ridiculous huge body onto the sofa and bury his face in Bucky's belly with a sigh. It's such a relief that Bucky can't say anything for a few minutes. He just sits there, dumbly stroking Steve's hair. 

"Hard work?" he asks eventually. 

"Good work," Steve says, and rolls back far enough to let Bucky pop a couple of peanuts in his mouth. "He's been through a lot, that kid. Just needs someone to tell him he's doing well. I wish he had someone else who could give him that, though. He shouldn't have to pay me to say it." 

The rumble of his voice, precisely where it's situated, starts to stir something up in Bucky, but he carefully doesn't think about it, because Steve doesn't seem like he has anything left in the tank after tonight. And he's got a task here, anyway. He takes a deep breath.

"So I was thinking she might like some coloured pencils, since she was interested in body art. Professional quality. Like the ones you have. Think you could help me pick some out?"

Steve just rolls his face back into Bucky's belly, but it's obvious he's wearing that goofy, idiot grin that's far too easy to put on his goofy, idiot face, and Bucky loves him so much he can't say it, this time.

**

The gift produces an unexpected text message, and another argument about whether Becca really wants him to go to the party. He lets Steve with that one, too.

The party is every bit as excruciating as he expects, and this first time he knows it's a task he has to accomplish on his own steam, without Steve to break the ice for him. Lily chats to him fearlessly, clearly placing him in some indeterminate social rank between authoritative parent and trusted playmate, and takes the pencils out of their case with reverence, one at a time. Only three, Jack musters up the courage to point a flimsy plastic sword in Bucky's direction before he disappears back into his bedroom. The grown-ups are harder work. While the club has a no-judgment policy drilled into its DNA, he can't expect the same mercies in the ordinary middle-class world Becca lives in. He watches Becca dart around the room, materialising exactly where a glass is empty or a small hand about to drop its piece of cake, busy with a momentum that's probably been driving her since Bucky fucked off and left her with two shattered parents, a debt and a divorce to manage. The adult guests at the party kindly ask him about himself, and he deflects their questions and lets them think he spent the last thirteen years stacking bar shelves at a nightclub. 

By late afternoon, he's so keen to whisk away used glasses and hide out in the kitchen, wrist-deep in suds, that the moms think he's a saint, but what would they know?

"You okay, Buck?" Becca asks him from the doorway, dumping a plate of cola-drenched sausage rolls in the trash. 

"Fine," he says a bit curtly and, when she lingers, adds, "Just don’t have a lot of chit chat fit for under-tens. History's a bit of a handicap when your history looks like mine."

She plucks a roll of paper towels from the cupboard by the fridge and pauses again.

"Well Lily's excited to have a mysterious new uncle to show off," she says after a bit. "So thanks for coming."

It feels strange to be washing pink plastic cups and fancy wine glasses in a kitchen with actual gingham curtains, looking out at the kids taking turns on the trampoline, all to a background of sugary pop music and the occasional high-pitched squeal. Strange like being dropped into a parallel universe. But not necessarily bad. 

"How was it?" Steve asks brightly when Bucky's easing onto the bike saddle behind him – and of course, he'll never understand the awkward part because Steve has got a dozen different ways of saying that his job is somewhere between lifestyle coaching and high-end escorting, all of them without a single skerrick of shame.

"It was okay," Bucky tells him. "She loved your pencils. Yeah, it wasn't too bad."

Then his heart feels too big with possibilities, so he slides up close behind Steve's back and lets himself cling. 

**

A busy week turns into two, turns into three, and one morning Bucky's taken aback to realise he can count every orgasm he's had over that time, they've all been here in this shower, and Steve was only present for one of them.

Steve's vacuuming the sofa when he comes out, running the fringed nozzle on gentle suction over the leather. Waiting until he's bent over to get right into the creases behind the seat, Bucky lays his hand on the strained denim over his ass and squeezes gently. 

"Gotta be clean enough to eat off, huh?" 

The motor's down low enough that Steve has to hear the insinuation in it, but all he does is swivel the hose around to attack Bucky's stomach, so that he dodges away, yelping. 

"The cleaning's gotta be done, pal, and you're either with me, or you're in my way."

Bucky watches him get back to work, and lets it go. At the end of the day, it's just like every other night lately, Steve crawls into bed, not long before midnight, too worn out from his clients to do anything more than sling his arm over Bucky's waist and sleep. The next night, Bucky's the one out late, working and then soaking up some beats, and the closest they get is his kiss dropped on the tip of Steve's unconscious nose. 

In the morning, rolling into the empty space Steve's vacated to head off to the gym, he weighs it up. They've had a pretty sure sex life, up to now. Steve expresses a lot of things through sex, and Bucky spent so long starved of touch that he still can't get enough of it, every time his perverse, damaged reflexes will let him have it. They've gotten pretty good at it these days, if he does say so himself. But all the same, the blank disinterest of the last few weeks can't be a good sign. 

It makes him think about what it's like for Steve, when Bucky has his bad days, when he doesn't even want to be touched, let alone make himself vulnerable in the way Steve craves. And before that, there was the period he could only tolerate intimacy on the most careful of terms, and shied away from Steve's beloved kink, and before that the best he could manage was transactional fucking on the prison terms he remembered, one body submitting to another for as long as it took to come. Through all that, Steve's big heart must have been hurting. 

It's too easy to take it for granted, Steve's phenomenal constancy. Too easy to dismiss it as pig-headedness instead of the devotion that it is. He thinks less of himself for only noticing it now, when it's wavering.

Bucky swaps his shifts on Monday and books them into the new exhibition at the state gallery, and a two-hour architecture tour that takes them right round the city center, and Steve asks so many eager questions the guide is practically blushing down to his collar by the end. 

After it, Bucky pulls a blanket and a bottle of wine out of his pack, and they sit in the park with hot dogs and watch the ducks for an hour. The sun even comes out, before long. Steve lies back in it, hands clasped behind his neck, eyes falling closed as Bucky remembers with a jolt that this, this is what his job is, to take the troubles off Steve's shoulders for a bit, so that he's got the resilience to help other people let go of theirs. 

Bucky just can't stop looking. There's a faint smile curving Steve's lips, and he's so handsome and solid he could be carved out of marble. 

Steve blinks his eyes half-open and squints at him. "You thinking of another surprise?" 

It must be the sun making him dizzy. He can't help it. "I'm thinking I oughtta ask you to marry me," he replies. "Already did that though." 

Steve opens his eyes properly. "Yeah. You did." 

Steve's watching him, hungry for something that's not quite discernible. He feels hot under the collar. Bucky takes off his jacket, remembering as he does it that he put on that thin t-shirt in dappled grey, with the vee at the front that's too deep to be just casually sexy. 

Steve notices. "You putting the moves on me, Bucky Barnes?" 

His voice is a playful, deep rumble and Bucky thinks he can ask at last. "That something I need to do?" 

He can feel Steve's gaze dragging stickily down him, over the clinging t-shirt and down the black denim of his stretched-out legs. Bucky pulls the tie out of his hair and shakes it loose so it just brushes his shoulders.

"You're so beautiful. Come down here."

He hasn't heard that hushed tone on Steve for a while. He leans back on his elbows and lets Steve look at him some more, tips his head back and closes his eyes against the light.

He's pretty sure Steve is going to reach out for him any moment. But instead, after a couple of minutes, he says thickly, "Where are we going with all this, Buck? Tell me what happens next."

Bucky's sun-dazzled brain can't seem to process that.

"Tell me," Steve repeats, a raw note creeping in, and he gets it.

He lets the first wave of instinctive resistance wash over him. Steve's the one who likes the talking almost as much as playing it out. There's not a single sex act beyond the reach of his vocabulary, and everything he wants to do, he knows how to describe with pinpoint anatomical accuracy, or with coy subtlety, depending on what his partner needs to hear. If Bucky had a solid line in sweet-talking when he was young, that got erased by all those years with men who only wanted to scratch a shameful biological itch and get it over with before they had time to hate themselves for it.

"Tell me what I can do for you," Steve is saying. "Tell me what you've been missing."

Bucky turns slowly onto his front and rests his forehead on his arms, as if hiding away might make it easier to say. He stumbles as he starts to talk. "I want – I miss – you."

He breathes in deep, and then he can feel it in his belly. He wants Steve's broad shoulders spanned over him like a roof.

"I want you all over me," he says, almost too low to hear. He swallows, breathes a little, forces himself to speak without thinking. "Smell of you everywhere. Love the feel of sweat on your body, how slick you get, all that muscle and I can't get a proper grip on you. Best smell in the world when you come straight home from gym and climb into bed with me." He pauses for a moment, and the arousal from that image starts to fizz headily in his veins. "I want you to hold me down so I can't move. All your weight on me." 

"Tie you up a little?" Steve asks softly into the silence. 

"No, your hands. Just your hands. I won't be fighting. I can do that now. I think I could let that happen without a fight. With you." 

"And then what?" 

"Wouldn't matter what. Whatever you wanted." 

"No," Steve insists, soft but firm. "What do you want?" 

Bucky doesn't know. He's never gone this far, never chased this rabbit down its hole, but Steve's asking, across the divide they've negligently allowed to open up between them. Steve wants this thing from him. He closes his eyes and lets the sun melt over the back of his head. 

"Your voice. You're talking the whole time." Not the Dom voice he uses on the other side of the office door, but the one he keeps for Bucky, endlessly coaxing, intimate and sweet. "You're talking real low. You don’t stop telling me how it's gonna be, what you're gonna do with me." 

"Yeah?" Steve sounds like Bucky feels, a bit muddled. "And what's that, Buck?" 

It really doesn't matter what. Right now, with his dick starting to get hard against the blanket. All he wants is to be an instrument of Steve's pleasure. 

"At first you're just holding me down, like this, on my front, and I'm struggling but you're talking in my ear until I stop. And then your hands are under my clothes, all over me, and if I try to move you grab my wrists before I can do anything. And then I stop trying, Steve. I just stop. And you're getting me undressed but you're still talking in my ear, telling me what to do, and I'm doing it because you're talking so sweet to me. I've got no control but it hardly feels like that at all, Steve, you make me want to –" 

He grinds his forehead into his folded arms, as if he could crush down the feeling that's too big for his head, but Steve says, "Want to want? Tell me." 

Bucky, eyes still closed, takes a few shallow breaths, his hands and his feet starting to get prickly with arousal. "You make me want to please you." 

Steve shifts beside him suddenly, and he thinks he can feel his scrutiny but he doesn’t open his eyes. "So I do what I'm told. I get the rest of my clothes off, and you do too, and then you've got me on my back and you're grinding down onto me. My hands, you're holding my hands over my head, and it's so good, but it's not what I need, and I know what's coming. I know you're going to make me ask for it – fuck, I hate that, I hate how pathetic it makes me feel, but the way you look when I do it, Jesus you're like a dream come true." 

"You, Buck. Tell me what you need." 

Bucky just groans, and gives in for just a second to the urge to grind against the blanket underneath him. "I want you inside me. Need your dick. I want to hear all the sounds you make when you're right up in there, bending me in half and grinding in slow at first. Want you to make me feel every inch." 

It's so clear in his head, him bent like a hinge with none of the strain and tricky angles of reality. Steve sliding into him, hot and true, slowly building the pace to a jackhammer thrust that rattles the bones. 

"Do you come, Bucky?" Steve's leaned in so close now that Bucky can feel his breath. 

"Yeah," he whispers. "Can't help it."

And he nearly does, there and then. A few more seconds of grinding against the blanket and he would have lost it. He lifts his head to look up at the garden bed and snap himself out of it. Fuck, he's leaking in his pants, hard as a rock from all the friction. He stills his hips self-consciously, even though there's a few inches' space between their lower halves and he doesn't think anyone's close enough to really pick up what they're doing. 

When he turns his head, Steve's eyes are dark, his lips parted, looking as dazed as he gets after a good session of grinding up against each other on the dance floor. Bucky doesn't need to glance down to know that he'll be in almost as bad a state. 

"You know I'd do all that for you, Bucky. You know it'd make me happy. If you asked." 

Bucky makes himself take a moment. "Yeah," he murmurs. "I'm asking." 

"Now?" Steve asks, so breathlessly eager it makes Bucky laugh.

"You're going to have to give me a few minutes before I can stand up from this blanket, for a start." 

Steve rolls onto his back and they lie there for a bit, winding down. 

"I love you so much like this, Buck." He throws out his arm and the back of his hand strokes aimless caresses on Bucky's shoulder, rucking the thin cotton. "Love the way you dig down deep. Every time I think you're perfect, you pull out something like this, and I can't –" 

He hauls his whole big body up, and leans over Bucky to kiss his temple, lingering close as if there might be more. 

"Can't what, baby?" Bucky turns to face him, reaches up to tuck his hair behind his ear. "Tell me."

Steve's face goes even softer. "I'm just crazy in love with you. That's all. As if you didn't know."

Before he can stop himself, Bucky makes a querying sound in his throat, because there might have been the smallest, deepest part of him that had fallen into doubt. 

"Oh, come on," Steve objects, and this time he kisses Bucky on the mouth, a swift, fierce brand of a promise. "As if you didn't know."

Steve's a man who keeps his promises. By the end of the evening, he knows. He knows so well it's hammered right into his bones.

**

It's a Friday night when Bucky's world gets turned on its head. A busy Friday, the club full of those new, big-spending drinkers that Tony's incessant promotion keeps on pulling in. Bucky's mixing drinks on autopilot, hair tied back tight, smiling at customers through his lashes as his hands move as fast as he can make them go.

As he lays a martini glass down and sets the shaker up, his gaze drifts over the customer's shoulder, where two weathered looking men are coming down the stairs with leggy, long-haired women too young to be their wives. He measures the shots and scoops in ice. When he glances back up, one of the men turns away towards the Vault, throwing light on the snakeskin tattoo that runs down over his jugular and under his collar.

Bucky's grip slips and he has to grab the shaker with both hands before it goes flying. His heart is beating low in his ribs, racing like someone's started crushing it in his fist. He knows that ink. He keeps his face turned down as he finishes the drink and slides in the olive skewer. The customer swipes his card, takes his glass and turns, opening up the view that Bucky has to force himself to look at. 

They called him Rattler. In and out of the system for nearly two decades by the time Bucky met him. Armed robber turned enforcer. Part of Vaccaro's crew. Bucky had sliced him up once, just below that tattoo, in the place they transferred him to for the start of his second term, defending himself desperately against retribution when Vaccaro was still in hospital. There's no way he's forgotten.

It happens so quick he can't believe it. This place that has been his refuge for more than a year, this corner which his hands know down to the last toothpick, suddenly feels as fragile as a house of cards. That man is a killer. 

But the prisoner he knew was Barnes, reclusive, taciturn, glowering from behind his curtain of hair. So Bucky steels himself, and puts on his most winning smile, and goes on serving drinks in the dim light of the bar, his mind working overtime mapping out exit routes and improvised weapons in a way he'd almost forgotten that he knew how to do. 

The group doesn't stay long. Just long enough to demonstrate to Bucky that safety is as weak as a soap bubble, waiting for the right rough touch to burst it once and for all.

**

The next morning he goes in to the gym, timing it for after Steve's finished up, and skulks around reception until he can waylay Sam between classes.

"How quick can you get me back in shape?"

Sam grins his easy grin. "Bit early for that, isn't it? The way I hear it, you got no call to be worrying about keeping yourself pretty. This place is a butcher's window of prime beef, and he has never even sniffed at a steak." 

"Not kidding around, Sam." Bucky plants his feet. "I'm ready to do the work. Whatever it takes."

Sam turns his head to examine him sidelong. "If you're ready to work, then I am ready to work you to the bone. Next strength training session starts at midday. You know where the change rooms are. And I hope you listened to the physiotherapist I sent you to, because I am not taking it easy on that shoulder of yours."

If Bucky's muscle strength was never going to improve after just one session, his eye does, and he can feel his reaction time speeding up, blow by blow. But it's not enough. For the kind of people he remembers in the depths of his gut, it's very fucking far from enough.

**

Despite what his jangling nerves tell him, the next day passes without incident, and the day after that too. Unbelievably, the inconsequential little events of his life keep on happening, oblivious to the threat hanging over him.

When he goes back to check on Daniel, he does take Steve with him, as promised. 

The kid's ridiculously eager to please this time, no trace of the truculence Bucky encountered. Seems like he's been looking after himself a bit better, too. There's a couple of apples and a lemon in a bowl in the middle of the table, no pizza boxes to be seen, and some of the more obvious surfaces have even been dusted.

He looks moist about the eyes when Steve gives him a shoebox with some of his old tools in, and colours at the packs of condoms Bucky shoved in to keep them from rattling around.

"Okay," Bucky says to him when their weak mugs of tea are almost finished. "Since you've figured out how to take care of the place, I've got a question for you. How about you put your own name on the lease?"

Across the table, Steve beams at him, completely misreading the situation, as always. Bucky hasn't needed this little sub-let as back-up accommodation for a long time. If anything, this decision is driven by an instinct that tells him to cut ties, to pack up his life so it's light enough to run with, if he needs to. If he has to run, he'll need to run a lot further than the outer suburbs.

"Sounds all right," the kid says, glancing up at Steve first. 

Bucky finds his obvious crush so endearing that he makes a detailed list of the apartment's many defects and negotiates him the best rent reduction that he can. It takes two weeks to sort it all out, and when the email comes through to say that the new papers are signed, he feels nothing but relief. 

**

Bucky answers the phone uncertainly. It could easily be a butt dial, if she's got him in her phone under B. But it quickly becomes apparent there's a point to the call.

"Lil's got a school project. An interview. She basically has to write a story about someone in her family."

Bucky has a very bad feeling about that. From Becca's tone of voice, she's not much happier than he is. A shame it had to come to this. He'd liked the kid, liked her self-possession, her frankness and her lack of judgement. 

"It's okay," he says. "You can tell her the truth."

There's a bit of a pause. 

"What did you think I told her before?" Becca sounds irritated now. "I didn't lie to my child. Not about something she's going to find out about sooner or later anyway. She knew before you ever met, and I'm telling you she wants to write a story about her uncle who went to prison." 

That leaves him reeling – because he hadn't thought of himself as an uncle, and it takes him back to realise that somewhere along the line he'd stopped defining himself by the crimes he committed. "And no, I don't think it's a great idea," Becca adds. "But I'm not so sure it's a bad one either."

Bucky's not sure of anything.

"You can say no," she goes on, softer. "I said you're busy, you might not have time to sit down with her."

He thinks about what Steve's going to say, if he says no.

"It's all right, Bec. I'll do it. If she wants." 

As it happens, Steve can't stop laughing when Bucky tells him. 

"At least she doesn't want to write about her uncle who manages a professional BDSM service. That could be awkward."

"If that's the attitude you want to take," Bucky tells him primly. "You're fired."

It doesn't stop him laughing. It's so obvious he thinks Bucky should do it that they don't even bother to discuss it.

They drop in one Sunday morning, and Becca's husband Mark takes Steve out into the garden where he talks home improvement like he'd spent his whole life out in the 'burbs. Back inside, Bucky eats cookies and answers Lily's random questions, and lets her record his voice on her tablet, while Bec hovers nearby in the kitchen and tops up his coffee. His nerves were all for nothing, because her questions are straightforward, and there's barely anything he needs to censor or lie about. She's wary of Steve, when he comes in from the garden – he's so big and golden and drawn up to his imposing best today – until he picks out two of her pencils and sketches a cartoon version of herself, shrunk down small enough to sit on the paw of their big ginger cat, Ernie.

"You really think this is a good idea?" he asks Becca, leaning in the kitchen door while Lily reels off a list of all the things she'd do if she was small enough to ride on a cat. 

She shrugs. "It's not going to go down well. But what kind of parents are we if we only let her do what's easy?" The cat brushes up against his leg and he bends down to rub its ears. "And maybe it's better to get it all out in the open. I'm not ashamed. That's one thing I'm not."

He lets the cat butt up against his fingers until it's had enough. "Thanks, Becca."

A week later, she sends him a photo of the finished project, pasted onto a big piece of blue cardboard. At the top, there's a hand-drawn picture of a figure standing next to a chair in an otherwise empty room. Underneath is the text.

_My uncle James went to prison. Prison is like having to sit in the time out chair for a long time. There's no games and you can't ever watch what you want on TV. You don't have to eat many vegetables. The best thing is when you get a good book from the library. I would miss Ernie most if I went into prison._

It's so naïve he wants to laugh, but at the same time her sparse words have captured the sheer monotonous poverty of the life he led for 12 years, and shown it to him in a new light. He takes himself off for a walk, and if that walk happens to go past a couple of those knick-knack stores that sell ridiculously high-end grooming products, and his favourite bakery, and a cinema, he can't be blamed for flashing his visa card around a little. 

"Lucky me," Steve says when he gets home, in the dark, not long after the last client has left. 

"Who says it's for you?"

"It's always for me," Steve grins. "One way or another." 

Funnily enough, at least one of the bags had been for Steve, right up until Steve put in his head that vision of sitting on a cushion in front of the sofa and having cedar-smelling oil massaged into his scalp. 

"I made you those smoked salmon cones with the cream cheese filling," Steve says casually, as if he hadn't very clearly got the same photo from Becca and dashed out to the store in between appointments. "There's a plate of them in the fridge." 

So for one night, at least, Bucky gets to push it all away and be someone who eats hand-rolled salmon bites while his ridiculously sexy husband strokes overpriced oil into his hair until he's ready to purr. He keeps the text, though. Because if Becca's not ashamed of it, he doesn't want to be, either.

**

One night he's taking a quiet moment to clean off the counter and, when he glances up, he's looking straight into the pale eyes of a killer. All those hours at the gym must have done him some good, because his reflexes kick in quick, and his gaze keeps on skating over the room with no sign of recognition. Rattler is with a woman, could be the same one as last time or he just has a type, and after a couple of moments, he turns away from the bar. Heart pounding against his breastbone, Bucky quietly shifts a cutting knife from the tray into his pocket, and turns around to straighten the liqueur bottles so he can use the mirror to scope out the room behind him. 

The man is nowhere to be seen when Bucky turns back. But he knows those kind of fellas. They're patient as crocodiles, waiting for their moment. If something's going to happen, it won't happen here. They won't lay a finger on him in public view. They'll scope out the range of the security cameras outside and keep clear of them, smoking in the darkness, patiently cracking their knuckles. They'll wait until Bucky's on his own.

He leaves with a big crowd, heading out for one last drink, and slips into a cab as soon as they pass the bus station.

**

The next morning, he's in T'Challa's office at a couple of minutes past nine, talking him through the video footage from last night. 

"That one. Thick neck with a scale tattoo. He's bad news, and all he's going to bring with him is more bad news. He comes back, you find a reason to keep him out of here." 

T'Challa looks at the frozen footage, winds it back to watch the man swagger towards the doorway a second time. His eyes rest on Bucky for a while before he speaks.

"Do you want me to put you on some kind of security detail? Is that it?"

"You should think about that. But no. Not me. I'm handing in my notice. I already asked around – I've got my shifts covered through until Thursday and I'm working on the week after that." 

It feels like being read, like a book, the way T'Challa's watching him, taking it all in.

"Look, I know you took a chance on me, back in the beginning." He remembers standing inside this very doorway, going on two years ago now, trying to hush the part of himself that hoped T'Challa would say no, so he could go back to his squalid little flat and eat tinned beans until it killed him. "I'm not gonna let you down now."

"Why not stay on then? I'm not afraid to take my chances with your armed robber."

Bucky shakes his head.

"Your mind's made up?"

"Gotta lay low for a bit. It's the only way." 

"I'm sorry to lose you, James." Bucky thinks there's sadness there, behind his gravity. "Anything I can do to help, be sure to let me know." 

Bucky turns back at the door. "There is one thing." 

T'Challa's face turns up in enquiry.

"Steve doesn't need to know we had this conversation. He's got enough on his plate without that too."

"I'll let you tell him yourself. In your own time." 

It's hard to be sure what he's thinking – he doesn't give a lot away – but Bucky thinks they both know he's not going to tell Steve any of it. 

** 

"Other people needed the shifts more than I did," is how he puts it on Saturday evening, brazening out Steve's disbelieving expression. "I've been doing pretty well with Thor lately. Thought I'd give myself a week off."

Here's a thing he didn't know. Lying to Steve hurts. It physically hurts, like a huge set of pliers squeezing his breastbone from the inside until it's ready to crack. 

"I promised my dad I'd give him a call this weekend," he adds, compounding the lie with unnecessary details, as if he wants to get caught. "Seems like as good a time as any."

"Okay then." Steve looks all-round disappointed as he pulls on his jacket and frowns at his keys. "I guess I'll see you later. Tell George I said hi."

After the growl of the bike pulling out, it falls quiet. Too quiet. The sort of quiet where a man who's got danger on his mind can hear it in every creaking beam. Right now, the club will be how he likes best. Bursting with anticipation in the hour before the doors open, when everyone is chatting and dressing and winding each other up. Normally, Steve would be nursing his one beer of the night at the bar, swapping encouragement and good-natured insults with the team, and idly watching Bucky prep garnishes in between.

He switches on his music, only to turn it off again on the second track. Not being able to hear the building's night sounds is even worse. He walks around the apartment, pulls all the blinds closed, switches on every light. He checks the locks on both doors and the windows. But he still can't settle. When he wakes up the laptop to watch the security feeds, it shows nothing but empty sidewalks outside. Over the year he's lived here, he's been alone in the house frequently, and it's never gotten under his skin like this. He slumps back into the sofa. 

With the house so silent and still, it takes him back to his first impression, when he came here to help the Captain out with his admin, cynically certain that the obvious charity was going to be tainted with an expectation of some unofficial payment in kind. This place had seemed strange and soulless at first, like an art gallery, somewhere stuck-up and fancy where you couldn't make any noise or do anything fun. Somewhere he didn't belong. He can't stop his foot jiggling against the floor. Why did he let that change? Why did he try to graft his trainwreck of a life onto someone who, in his stubbornly idiosyncratic way, heals for a living? 

The more he thinks about it, the harder it is to deny the clash. Steve sells his clients a taste of powerlessness, packaged up so it's civilised, all bound up by rules and conventions and the ever-present safewords. His business is taking danger and pulling the teeth out of it. But the world Bucky comes from is the actual jungle, where animals eat each other raw and lick their lips afterwards, where dominance is mercilessly demonstrated and never tamed. And that world is stuck to Bucky's feet like a shadow. All it took was the right light to bring it back to life. He was an idiot to think he could outrun it. 

Glumly, he switches on the projector. The app has got one of last week's football games queued up, so he plays that on mute just to have something to distract his eyes. But tonight, all he can see in it is yet another mechanism for channelling the law of the jungle into a temporary civilised shape. A huge, expensive lie that glorifies the release of built-up testosterone into something heroic. He watches it anyway, thinking how quickly it would descend into misery and fear, if you took away the rules, took away the cameras, and locked the gates. 

When the second game's done, he goes to the fridge for a beer and drinks half of it standing up, but his nerves won't stop jangling. Jesus, his heart is racing. The fear is like a rot. He's brought it home from the club and now he's spread it here too. 

That's the moment when his attention catches on the sketchbook on the table by the window, where Steve quietly worked all afternoon. 

He puts the bottle down before he can drop it. Steve. He's been so fucking worried about barricading himself in here, but Steve's the one who's out there in the world full of predators. And Bucky let him go out there unaware. 

In the bedroom, he pulls out the cloth bag tucked into the sleeve of that winter coat he hardly ever wears and empties it on the bed. The folding knife he used to carry everywhere, the black lock knife, and the 6-inch fixed blade he can't legally take onto the streets with him. With two in his pockets and one in his hand, he feels a fraction less exposed. 

He stands in the main room twirling the unsheathed knife in his fingers. Men like Rattler, men like Vaccaro, have what they think of as a moral code. The stricter their code, the easier they can live with the most terrible things they've done. Their code most definitely has some vague provisions for retribution by proxy when the offence is severe enough and the perpetrator is out of reach. A gang associate is fair game; a brother; for the most grievous betrayals, a child. He doesn't know if Steve qualifies to bear the punishment for what Bucky did to Vaccaro, and to everyone who tried to avenge him. His mind whites out when he tries to think about it. 

It makes his heart pump so hard, the killing weapon in his hand and the remembered adrenalin it brings with it, that he's reaching for his phone before it hits home. The single most dangerous thing he can do is show his face at the club and provide both a last chance for them to recognise him, and a link to Steve. His best chance of keeping them both safe is to stay put. His knuckles go white with frustration around the knife. Then he forces himself, step by step, to the sofa and folds himself onto it. 

It's less than two hours until Steve finishes up, but the minutes crawl by as he stares at the next game until it's just a blur and tries to quiet the flight-or-fight panic in his veins. 

When Steve gets home, he's still there, hunched up, fallen into a light doze, too wound up to sleep, too exhausted for anything else. At the sound of the door, he twists his hand under him to conceal the knife in it. 

"How's George?" 

Bucky looks at him blankly for a moment before he remembers he hadn't even called. 

"All right," he says, sitting up to examine Steve for injury and seeing none. "Same as ever. How was the club?"

"All right," Steve echoes. "Same as ever."

There's something distant in him, as he hangs his jacket and shuts the bathroom door behind him. That's the damage a lie can do, Bucky thinks. And he should know. He's been destroying everything he got his hands on for thirteen years now. Why would year fourteen be any different?

**

"Bad dream?" Steve asks sleepily sometimes before dawn, as Bucky wakes to find himself plastered to Steve's back and trembling with the adrenalin of fear. 

He squeezes his eyes shut until they ache, but the vivid image is scoured into his mind. Steve's gentle hands broken and burned. His hurt, uncomprehending eyes. His bright hair dark with blood. The wet rip of a blade in flesh, and Bucky tearing his hands raw on the other side of the wire fence, screaming, too late to get through. 

Steve strokes his forearm. "s'all right, Buck. I gotcha."

But he's got no idea, no idea what's out there, waiting for them both.

The grey morning takes forever to creep in. As he lies awake in that lonely nether world, choices fall away until there's only one that makes any sense. He should pack his bag and run. Take it all with him, the danger and the ugliness. He doesn't know what he can tell Steve though, about why he's leaving. What would be the least cruel lie to tell. 

**

Over the next week, Bucky spends a lot of time walking, when he's not at the gym trying to scour off the layer of softness that the last year has left on him. Hood low over his face, hands dug deep in his pockets and clutching their weapons, he paces the streets of their neighbourhood, unnoticed among the trucks and delivery vans. The hyper-vigilance slips back onto him like a set of well-worn clothes. He knows this hunted feeling. And if the cage he's in is bigger than the prison where he learned his survival skills, it's still a cage. He keeps to a two-mile radius, away from bars and shops and anywhere that could risk a third unlucky meeting. 

While he walks, he plays it out in his head, how he could stake out the club until Rattler's next visit, knife him in an alley nearby, make himself a cold-blooded killer at last, and draw a line for retribution that leads right back to Steve's workplace. The other way it goes, he shadows the man back to his base, and takes him down, and a few of his crew if he really gets the jump on them, but if he leaves alive a single one of them who recognises him, he's right back where he started and with an even bigger target on his head. 

He spends a lot of time out on the streets, because he can't spend all day at home when there's three of them in the room. Himself, and Steve, and his past sitting like a menacing intruder in one corner or another. Some days he can't stay in the house because Steve's instincts are tuned to distress, and there's only so long Bucky can maintain the focus not to let it show. He deflects Steve's questions matter-of-factly, every different way he can. I'm giving myself a break. I don't need the shifts as bad now. You said it yourself, I can't spend my whole life stacking cider bottles. Every time his phone chimes with an event set-up gig, he feels the weight come off him like a boulder, for a day at least.

He does call his dad, in the end, and asks an hour's worth of questions about the prisoner support group he's gotten himself involved with, and ends up spending the rest of the day looking up parole procedure online, cross-referencing the statues, regulations and guidelines, and putting together a list from his own memories of who got it and who didn't and what seemed to make the difference between one thing and the other. 

After that, there's two days of pounding rain, and no work. When the frustration gets unbearable, he throws out the sort of challenge that ends up with Steve bending him over the nearest piece of furniture to give it to him the only way he can take it right now, bruising hard, with and no chance of accidentally meeting each other's gaze until it's over. 

The last time it happens, Steve's stroking up his back with the tenderness of post-coital endorphins, keeping the two of them stubbornly connected for as long as he can while he waits for Bucky to get himself off over the coffee table. A few more rough strokes and he's there, off the edge and diving into those precious seconds of blind oblivion, but it's shallow, it's weak, third time today, it's like trying to drown himself in a puddle, he can't quite get the relief he wants, and if he keeps his face hidden, he doesn't quite manage to bite back the snarl of frustration. 

"Buck," Steve says, one raw word, the sort of plea he only used to make with his eyes, back in the beginning. 

It hurts to twist out from under him and throw himself in the shower, putting the locked bathroom door between them. He watches the soap suds slink down the drain and thinks, yep, that's just how he is, letting every good thing he managed to get slip right through his fingers. 

When he gets out, a long while later, the apartment is empty, and it stays that way until ten minutes before the evening's first client. While Steve's working, he sits on the bed and stares at the travel bag he came here with, more than a year ago, slumped underneath the clothes rack. He thinks about what he'd put in it, and where he'd go first but, each time, his eyes catch on those fancy shoes Steve bought for that dinner when they got engaged, that are comfortably worn now to the shape of active, restless feet and, each time, the will to do it slips through his fingers too. 

The next day, at five minutes past nine, he calls Bruce about that job offer he rejected all those weeks ago, and tries to keep it business-like.

"Your timing could be better," Bruce tells him, sounding harried. "The inductions started two weeks ago." 

But maybe Bucky didn't do as good a job as he thought of keeping the desperation out of his voice, because after a few beats he adds, "I'll see what I can do."

** 

There's an interview with HR, and another with a manager who looks a few years younger than Bucky and spends the entire time frowning at his tablet. But it seems like they badly need an extra body because another two days after that he's sitting in a pale grey cubicle with a shiny new laptop, a script and a list of names.

"Look, it's not where I would have started you," Bruce had told him when he called with the offer. "Debt collection doesn't exactly play to your strengths. But it's what we've got right now." 

When he scrolls down the list, it's three pages long. The details in the top margin tell him these are defaults on rent-to-buy agreements for consumer whitegoods. He finds the first entry in the debtor database he spent the morning learning how to use and then minimises that window. At the top of the screen is the script. Good morning, [Sir/Madam]. This is [your first name] calling on behalf of …

No thought required. He's just a cog in a machine, giving a human voice to a robotic system, getting paid the sort of wage that's been whittled away by decades of competition from offshore call centers. But being here means not going back to the club. It means keeping himself busy and keeping Steve safe, and maybe keeping his marriage alive. 

He puts the earpiece in and makes his first call. It rings to voicemail and he follows the instructions to leave no message and enter the code for callback. He's up to his fifth name before he even gets a pick-up.

But he perseveres, one row after another, and before he knows it, it's mid-afternoon and his list is finished, callbacks followed up, and all the boxes neatly ticked. 

His supervisor, Lee-Anne, looks over it critically when he brings it to her. 

"You got a hit rate over 50% with pick-ups, did you?" she says flatly. "Add in callbacks, that looks close to 70."

The way she says it, he might have made up it all up, and he thinks, yep, here we go, an ex-con wearing business casual is still a criminal. He knew this was never going to work, from the moment Bruce suggested it. But her dry tone isn't a patch on the way even the best of the guards used to talk, so he takes it in his stride. 

"I started to call from my cell phone," he tells her. "Anyone who owes money isn't going to answer a number that looks like it comes from an office. And it was lunch hour. Guess I got lucky."

She turns her evaluating look from the page up to him.

"Unusual name," he says, pointing to the third on the list. "After the second callback, I searched it. Came up with a match for a guy who passed away two months ago. Might be a good idea to run the list against death notices, if you can get the data."

"You're right. We can't though." After a few moments' consideration, she glances down at the yellow sticky note stuck to the base of her monitor. "I'm going to send you another list. Get your notepad and I'll run you through the final warning process."

Final warnings turn out to be even more unpleasant. The robotic script isn't much help when people are yelling, or swearing, or falling into a hopeless silence that's worse than both.

He spends the bus ride home staring bleakly out the window and thinking there's no fucking way he's going back for more of it tomorrow. 

But when he opens the door, Steve's got flour on his cheek and a plate of hand-crumbled chicken schnitzel ready for the pan, and he forces his mouth into a worn-out smile, reminding himself that he's only got one alternative left if he can't make the job stick.

**

The cubicles around him are mostly populated with new recruits in their early twenties who met during the inductions and chat noisily to each other on either side of lunchbreak and when they're setting up for the day. 

"Done this kind of work someplace else, huh?" asks his right-hand neighbour, Ajay, at the start of his second day. 

"Just a bit of small business book-keeping," Bucky tells him, and fishes his headphones out of his pack before the conversation can pry any deeper into his past. 

The one time he leaves the building for lunch, the city crowd no longer feels comfortingly anonymous. Rattler could be around any corner, and the city is full of men like him. Most of the prisons he spent time in are less than 50 miles from here. It's a miracle it took so long to run into a face from the past. After that, he picks up sandwiches from the gas station on his way in. 

In his second week, after an entire morning of marking people's names with the code for "repossess and pursue recovery", he takes a coffee break and reads that induction document again, nice and slow, until he finds an alternative. The code for "payment plan" eases the tightness in his chest just a little bit, when he gets someone he thinks could really use a chance. Lee-Anne's in a management conference all day so he doesn't get challenged on it, and in the afternoon he's got software training, and the day after that he's shifted onto a team that's compiling performance measurement data across the business that requires manually reviewing seven hundred files and marking dates in a spreadsheet. 

The nightmares don't let up, but the gruesome prison scenes start to alternate with dreams of endless, smothering bureaucracy, sitting down to a pile of work papers two inches high and opening the manual to find the pages blank and his neighbours too busy to tell him what section he's in today, let alone what he's supposed to be doing. They're not the sort of nightmares Steve has to wake him from, but that just means he spends all night in them, and wakes up feeling exhausted.

In his first six days, he sits in five different desks and works on three different teams. The work isn't the worst part, though. What wears him down is the constant irritation of having five people within three feet of him, and another forty in the maze of partitions this side of the elevators, hemmed in by the partners' offices that soak up all the natural light. With the fluorescent glare and the feeling of eyes on him every moment, it's more like prison than he could ever have imagined. 

By the Friday of week two, his nerves are so raw as he heads for the elevator at two minutes past five that he hops off the bus at the half-empty hotel by the interchange just to sit in a corner for an hour and not say a fucking word to anyone. 

It's a mistake. As he turns to go, reflexes just slightly numbed from the beer, a broad man with a shaved head and thick black brow pushes open the door, and Bucky's nerves shudder as he recognises Rattler's one-time cellmate, Ortiz. In the half-second it takes to realise he's so tired he's got no fucking idea which pocket his blade is in, and flick his gaze desperately to the two empty glasses on the bar, the man steps into the light and shows Bucky he was wrong.

He feels sick with wasted adrenalin all the way home, and takes advantage of Steve's busy evening to pour himself straight into bed. He can't see a single way he can make this work. Even for Steve, he can't keep doing this.

**

He wakes up to Steve's step in the corridor. If his gym session's done, it must be late. He can smell the butter of fresh pastries even before Steve puts the tray down on the free pillow and settles on the bed. 

Bucky looks wearily at the tray, and then Steve.

"Hey Buck," he says, wearing a smile like coming home to find Bucky in his bed was everything he needed in his day. "You made it to Saturday."

Bucky stretches conspicuously to ward off the caress he can see coming. Steve's gentle touch sets him on edge these days. Every time, it makes him think of one of those bloody dreams, where those animals have got their hands on Steve and hurt him. Shot, burned, beaten, cut up … he's seen it every way, and Steve's nearness brings it back each time, as if those injuries were something he could catch directly from Bucky's skin.

There's a flicker of hurt Steve can't quite hide. 

"You want a coffee?" he asks, rolling back to his feet and heading for the kitchen without waiting for an answer.

After two weeks living off the instant blend in the office, Bucky never wants coffee in his stomach again, but he can drink half if he has to.

"Some of the crew were asking about you after the masterclass on Wednesday," Steve calls out while he works. "They're heading out to a new place after their shift tonight. Gave me an address. I said we'd be there."

Bucky lets his eyes fall closed. Where does he even start with that? The masterclass he forgot to ask about, or the invitation he has to turn down? 

"Buck? I worked it out with Natasha so I can finish up early and come back to get you. Or you could come in with me. Say hi to everyone."

He's married to the world's most indefatigable optimist. A man who doesn't know how to quit. And every new angle he tries, Bucky has to find a new lie to cut him off.

"Don't think I can." He hopes the weird cadence of his voice sounds like fatigue. "Got a couple of online courses I have to do over the weekend. Catching up on stuff I missed." They haven't given him remote access. He's going to have to find something on YouTube that looks close. "And I'm pretty beat already."

There's a silence he really doesn't like.

"You want to cancel your session with Sam this afternoon then?"

Steve's standing in the bedroom doorway with his arms crossed, waiting. It's obvious he knows something's wrong between them. It's obvious he knows when he's being played. But Bucky also knows it's not in him to call Bucky the liar he is, and he's not going to force the argument when Bucky's looking worn out.

"No," he says, flat. "All the hours I spend sitting down, I gotta do something to get the blood moving."

He stands there for a few moments more, like he's giving Bucky a chance to take it back. Then he nods once and goes off to fix the coffee in silence. Bucky puts his arm over his face and wonders what fucking good it's doing either of them, him hanging around. 

**

The big fight about those outright lies never happens, but a string of more trivial clashes takes its place. It's not hard to find reasons. Bucky's time's so stretched and his attention so distracted he's dropped the ball on Steve's schedule more than once. By Sunday morning, they've traded terse words over a double-booking, and a forgotten refund, and a laundry run that Bucky volunteered for as a reason to get out of the house and never followed through. Every single time, Steve's unassailably right, and polite about it, politer each time, with the air of a slightly disappointed employer, until Bucky starts to snap back at him like the insolent underling he's starting to feel like.

"All right then," Steve says coolly after the last argument, hoisting the laundry bag easily onto his shoulder. "I'll take care of it."

He sounds wounded, and somehow smug about the very fact of being wounded, like he's going to lead by example and rise above both the boilingly mistrustful atmosphere and the neglected chore – he sounds so goddamn brimming with virtue that Bucky comes _this fucking close_ to throwing his mug at full force at the door that just closed between them. Instead, he glares at it, and puts it down, and sinks back onto the sofa with his head in his hands.

He can't go on this way. The life he's stumbled into, between these four walls and the teeming office, has become a prison in every way except that, in between one and the other, there's thirty minutes of fresh air and sky. He knows their marriage isn't going to survive under this kind of pressure. It doesn't deserve to, if it stays like this.

The laundry run takes ninety minutes and Bucky spends half of that motionless on the sofa with his head pounding. There's not much he could do that would test Steve's phenomenal loyalty, but lying might just be enough. Lying and, when confronted, doubling down. It's made him doubt things he's never doubted before. When he scans the room, it's all Steve, from the humble browns and trusty blues of the decor to the sketches on the walls. Bucky could walk out of here tomorrow and the difference would barely even show. 

Being real about it, he's only ever had two choices. If he doesn't find a way to bridge the chasm of suspicion he's opened up between them, he'll be down to one. 

When Steve comes back, he's sitting on the sofa with his feet bare and his collar in his lap, and his hands clasped demurely around it. 

In one mobile expression, Steve manages to convey everything from disbelief to outright affront.

"Wait a minute," Bucky breaks in softly, before the lecture can begin. "You always say I can ask."

He can see Steve biting back a few stronger responses before he puts down the laundry bag and scrubs his hand over his face.

"You think you're in the right headspace for this, Buck? Because I know I'm not."

For a while, Bucky doesn't say anything, and the pause seems to sap some of the resistance out of Steve, too. The longer Bucky sits there, rotating the collar slowly in his lap, the more certain he is this has to be the way. He thought he'd gotten it out for Steve, but right now all he can think of is the worn weight of it resting above his collarbones, banishing his problems and replacing them with ones Steve can solve. 

He's mastered the note of half-hearted challenge that calls to Steve's dom instincts. He cocks his head and looks up through his eyelashes. "Think you could get there?"

Steve's gaze rests on him a long time, disappointed, yes, but thoughtful too.

"If you're still sitting there when I get back," he says, moving towards the door he just came in. "We can talk about it."

There's no engine noise, so wherever he's going, it's on foot. Bucky can guess. Searching out a quiet corner where he can close his eyes, the way he does between client sessions sometimes, and loosening the restraints on the power he's normally so careful about. Giving himself permission to command. And, if Bucky guesses right, packing away his present anger somewhere deep, so it can't get mixed up with the dynamic between them. 

Bucky tries to do a bit of the same. It's hard, though, to get past the weeks of heightened tension and think himself into a state where he welcomes the submission. It's hard to make himself forget the danger waiting for him outside.

All the same, he's still sitting there when the door opens, the buckle of the collar facing exactly where it was before. Steve's attention rests on it for a moment before he approaches. His mood has shifted as he sits beside Bucky. The weight of sadness is still quietly there, but behind that he's calm.

He lays his hand over the collar, their fingers just touching. 

"You going to tell me what you want?" And there it is. That's the voice that pulls Bucky under, steady and endlessly gentle. "C'mon, I need some direction here." He tries to let it do its work, struggles to look inside himself and find the thing that will set him free today, but he's wound up so tight he can't quite shake the thoughts loose from his subconscious. "Take care of you a little? Is that it?"

His gut reacts very badly to that, the intense vulnerability of letting Steve take him apart slow. The next breath rattles in his throat.

"What's up with you, Bucky?" Steve sighs. He reaches up to stroke the hair back from Bucky's temple. "Tell me."

For an instant, Bucky wants to. Craves the time when they were open with each other, when they could be. Steve's voice drops even lower. "Whatever it is, we can work through it. You've got my word on that, Buck. But I can't fix it until you tell me."

And that's the reason he can't speak. Steve's got a fighter's heart. Once he recognises his adversary, he'll pour himself into battle, and he won't stop. But Rattler and his crime ring, they're not anything like the opponents Steve's faced in Sam's sparring sessions. They're brutal beyond Steve's ability to comprehend. And if he takes the fight to them, they will hurt him.

Steve's hand in his hair feels uncomfortable all of a sudden. He can't ditch the feeling that every molecule of him is poison, seeping up into Steve's skin and bones. It's like a spiral. The more he gives in to it, the more he hates himself, the more he leans into Steve's touch. He jerks away.

He raises his gaze just enough to be provoking and says sullenly, "It's just work."

Steve's hand falls back into his lap. His posture firms up, like he's taking control of himself, first, and then of the dynamic between them.

"Like that, is it? Maybe I need to tie you up then. Take my time -"

That's a huge no. Bucky can't bear to be restrained, not when it's weeks since the two doors seemed solid enough to keep danger away from them.

"Okay, all right," Steve gentles him instantly. "No ropes. Just the collar." He rests the weight of his hand on Bucky's shoulder, watching him closely as if can't help wanting to forge a connection out of this, now that Bucky's got him here. But Bucky can't do it. Though the actions are familiar, the state of mind won't come. The resistance in him is building instead of letting go. 

"What else?" Steve feels his way through the silence Bucky can't seem to break. "I can loosen you up. Put something in you. You know I'd like that." 

Bucky's face twists with helpless dissatisfaction. Those things that have worked so powerfully on him before just aren't enough today. They're too soft to shake him out of the panic spiral he's been in. His nerves are so shot with adrenalin he won't even feel a plug. He needs something—

The moment his thoughts seize on it, he knows it's right. Steve's office is full of things that can _hurt,_ and replace the muddle of fear in his head with the clarity of immediate, concrete pain. He pushes himself up and goes to the cupboard in the next room. 

"All of them?" Steve says when he comes back, sitting up straight. 

He shrugs. "Don't know what they're going to feel like."

He lets his chin jut out mulishly, knowing how firmly Steve would come down on a client who tried to bend the rules half as far as Bucky has today. 

"Put them down then." 

The tone of that sizzles up Bucky's spine, because the collar's not on him yet. He doesn't even know if they've started. So when he does as he's told, and puts down the cane, and the paddle, and the flogger, it's on that dangerous border line between reality and play. 

"You know what the spanking bench looks like." The sizzle's heating up Bucky's palms now, because he's never heard Steve give it its full name before, but he nods. "Bring it over here." 

The low, simple orders are going straight to his belly, one after the other. He breathes deep, and muscles in his chest that have been cramped for weeks start to loosen. 

"Wait. Take your shirt off for me." It's only a moment of hesitation. "Bucky." 

How does he do that? It's a low purr, full of anticipation, just a hint of warning. Bucky pulls his shirt over his head and drops it without looking back. 

The bench is good quality, sturdy wood with leather trim. They usually move it together, when a session calls for it. He assesses it with a professional eye. It works all his muscles to tilt it up by the handle at one end, slide his other arm around the base, and heft it up, then power up out of his squat. He moves slow, and lets Steve look. That's the thing with physical work. When he's focused on his twin tasks, of moving the bench and giving Steve something pretty to look at, there's no room in his mind for anything else. He's not calm yet, but it's somewhere he could get to. 

"Put it down, nice and easy." 

For a moment, he thinks how weird it is that he should want this, after his whole life history. But when it's Steve giving him those straightforward tasks, and wanting him to succeed, when he knows he could end it with a word, well apparently it's exactly what he needs right now. 

He concentrates on setting it down the way Steve wants it, careful and neat, parallel to the sofa. Then, since he's down there, he rolls onto his knees and crawls over. The unfamiliar sight turns Steve's expression yearning, and then dark. Bucky settles on his knees and curves his head down, lifting his hair up off his neck. 

"Go on," he finds his voice at last. "Put it on me." 

Steve's sigh practically has Bucky's name in it. Then he's sliding the leather on, and fastening it nice and loose. 

"Okay?" 

He's not there yet. There's still too much business in his thoughts. But they're heading the right way. "Okay." 

Steve's hands play in his hair idly for a bit. The yearning's still there in his eyes, and Bucky knows he wants them to be kissing. He angles his head away, just a fraction, but far enough to say no. 

"Lean over the bench then. That way." Hesitantly, Bucky does as he's told, approaching the long side of it and folding his arms on the seat, hunched slightly forward with his knees against the base of the contraption.

The soft creak of Steve getting up from the sofa sets of a buzz of anticipation in his nerves. He paces around in front, so Bucky can see it's the flogger he's picked up, its black tails swishing lightly in the air. When he lifts his gaze, Steve's examining him with that crease of deep concern on his brow. He raises the implement slowly so its strands caress Bucky's upper arm. The leather slips cool and clinging against his skin.

"You sure?"

"Do it." 

Steve steps away behind him. The whip is old, worn in, but still powerful enough to leave stinging lines of sensation across his upper back when it comes down. He adjusts his elbows on the seat and braces. The next blow falls on the same spot, making him shiver with heightened tenderness. There's a few more cautious strokes before the angle shifts, opening up new skin and fresh sensation. If he keeps the flinching under control, he can't stop the involuntary tightening of muscles across his back, trying to steel against the sting. The pace picks up after that, once Steve is sure he can take it. With an experienced hand, Steve switches left and right, one lash after another, until the skin of Bucky's upper back starts to heat on both sides and the sting is turning raw, and, with a shudder, he has to force himself not to shrink away. He's breathing hard by the time Steve pauses. The sensation is like the retinal imprint of bright light: the intensity keeps on blooming after the stimulus is removed.

It hurts. But it's only pain within his tolerances that he can endure for as long as it takes. Just like when his ink went on. There's nothing thrilling about it. 

He takes a few more strokes before he says, "Enough."

"C'mon, Buck. Give me a colour." 

"I dunno. What's the colour for just not doing anything for me?" 

Steve's disappointment is practically audible. 

"All right," he says after a while. When he steps over, his hand on Bucky's shoulder produces more of a spark than any of the blows had. But that's not what he wanted. His head is far too clear. The frustration is starting to rise in him again when Steve adds, "Get undressed and straddle the bench properly."

Something in Bucky likes that idea, likes it a lot. He stands up to skin his track pants down his thighs. Kicking away that literal layer feels like casting off something metaphorical too. His skin prickles in the air. He settles his knees onto the padded rests on either side of the bench, then goes down on his elbows with the seat under his breastbone. 

The leather trails ticklishly up his thigh and over his ass, so there's a shiver of anticipation under his skin already when Steve raises the flogger and lands his first strike. 

It's shocking what a change it makes, the humiliation of the position, the waiting, and the sudden, blooming of sensation. It makes all the difference, when the pain is sexualised. From the first sting of the flogger across his ass cheeks, he feels it. There's something about the combination, completely contrived, that puts it on another plane from everyday pain. This is the spark he was looking for, to force a reaction from his frazzled nerves. The gas and the match together at last. This is what he wants. His pent-up breath comes out with a needy edge of voice in it. 

"That feel good?" Steve asks knowingly and brings the flogger down with a fraction more force. "Yeah, that's it."

It's like the unbearable abstract threat of the last month, never solid enough to lay hands on but never absent either, has finally taken form. It's there in the razor lines of pain along his skin: a good, clean, instant ache that his body knows how to brace for and absorb, so much easier than that terrible itch of imminent violence that never quite arrived. There's shame mixed up in it, too. And helplessness he knows too well, but he's helpless by choice this time, all of it is his to own. If he feels these things dimly in his head, the response is undeniable in his body. All those weeks of anxious tension channelled at last into arousal.

"You're pretty like this, Buck. So good for me." 

Steve keeps on murmuring that kind of sweet nonsense as it goes on and on, an even, consistent pace from an expert hand, until Bucky starts to lose his grip on himself and drift, the slap of leather on flesh becoming a distant, hypnotic rhythm. There's a mindless plateau he stays on for a good long time, that ends with harsh stroke that cuts through to emphasise how easy Steve's been taking it until then. He abandons his rhythm, switching to irregular strokes that Bucky can't steel himself to meet. Bucky's panting, heat from the abused skin melting through his muscles, when Steve lays off at last. 

Steve's fingertips, light as a feather, leave an electric trail over his inflamed skin. "Ready for something else?" 

Bucky grunts hazily in the affirmative and braces.

The paddle thuds deep into his glutes, leaving a legacy of pain deep in the muscle. He cries out on the first stroke. Steve pulls his strength after that, and doesn't keep it up long. It's only when it's done that Bucky can feel the defensive tension unknot and leave him fluid again. 

The cane works him up harder. He likes the whistle, the intense, localised sting, and the involuntary clench of muscle it leaves in its wake, visible evidence for Steve of what he's feeling. 

But best of all, it turns out when they run out of implements, is Steve's bare hand. He brings it down with his fingers spread out, clutching over the tender skin, while his free hand holds Bucky down by the back of his neck, and the sensation of every impact cuts through his flesh like butter after all the warming up. He gets lost again in the rhythm of Steve's blows, a sharp slap, another, another, then a pause and Steve's fingertips running tenderly over the heated skin. Bucky's not crying out anymore, just releasing these spaced-out little sighs he can't seem to hold back. 

"Too much, Buck? You want me to stop?" Steve asks without losing the beat, because he's a bastard like that and he wants to hear Bucky say _no, s'good, no, please,_ brokenly, with his eyes still closed, chasing the pain and the humiliation as if they could get him to orgasm all by themselves. Christ, he's so far out of his head, clinging to the bench with his whole chest collapsed onto it and his ass right up in the air where Steve can get at it some more. He's rocking with each stroke now, the last resistance ground out of him. His eyes are screwed shut and every thought in his head has gone quiet, except the urge to give himself over completely. 

He hears himself make a needy, helpless noise when it abruptly stops. 

"Now I want you to come for me," Steve says, then there's one, two wet fingers pushing their way into him and curling down hard until his legs are jelly. Steve's other hand slides underneath to get a firm grip on his dick and jerk him tight and fast. And Bucky's not noisy in bed, not unless he's turning his reactions up for Steve, but he can't help it. He's so out of his head with pain and arousal, and he's needed this for so long, he's making helpless _aah_ sounds of torment all through it, and when he comes it's with a wrecked sob of relief. 

He's aware, a little later, of Steve back on the sofa, the slick sounds of him urgently getting himself off. He should move, he should see what Steve needs from him. "Stay there," Steve says tightly. "Stay right where you are." 

He lets himself drift back down, moulded around the bench, and not long after there's the grunt and the long, satisfied exhale of Steve's pleasure. 

He aches everywhere when he gets up, not just where Steve struck him, but all the joints and muscles that had absorbed the impact and spread it out. It's a good ache, all his limbs telling him they're alive, and it fills up his nerves so there's no room for anything else. In the bathroom mirror, he's unbruised, just vividly pink all the way from his thighs up to the base of his spine. He takes his collar off and drinks deeply from the faucet. When he comes back with a wet cloth, Steve's an enticing picture with his track pants tugged down to his thighs and his t-shirt still clinging damply under the arms with sweat. His eyes flutter open to watch Bucky cleaning him up.

He clumsily swipes back Bucky's hair. "What you needed?"

Too direct, too exposing. Bucky pulls back from his touch. He focuses on folding the cloth over tidily, so he won't have to look at Steve's expression, which is always unguarded at moments like these. 

"Not complaining."

Then he gives up and dumps it on the floor for later, flops onto the sofa, his cheek on Steve's thigh. With a couple of slow breaths, he's settled again. It must be the extra endorphins from pain going to his head like vodka shots. He hasn't felt this deeply at peace for weeks. As Steve shakes out the blanket and drifts it over him, he pictures that feeling like a protective bubble shielding him, and he pushes that field of invincibility out with his mind until it enfolds the house, and a few of the streets around. 

Steve's stroking his arm through the blanket. He doesn't know if they're going to make it. But fuck it all, for half an hour he's going to lie here and pretend all the evil in the world doesn't exist, and it's just the two of them, like it used to be. 

**

It lasts less than two weeks, until a Saturday when the buzz of a text message interrupts another night of anxious clock-watching on the sofa. 

_Get the ice out,_ Natasha has texted in haste. _Sending him home in a can._

She corrects before his heart can stop. _Cab._

He's on his feet in a second, going to the bathroom for the medikit, first, and then to empty out the contents of the small freezer, the phone to his ear the whole time. She doesn't pick up his frantic calls but when he's wrapping the chicken breasts and frozen peas in dish towels and trying not to picture the injuries they're too small for, she calls back.

"It's only a busted cheek. Looks worse than it is. Dude must have had knuckles made of concrete."

"What dude?" he asks tersely.

"Some hard case making trouble. Him and his buddy wouldn't take no for an answer when Ivan knocked them back. Steve was just coming off shift. He made it his problem. You know how he is."

"Did you see them?" Bucky asks urgently. 

Her voice grows concerned. "Old enough to know better. I dunno, beefy and bald and covered in ink."

"What kind of ink?"

"What do you mean? Bad ink. Rough. The one who messed up your sweetheart's face had scales on one side of his neck, flames on the other. But they're gone now. "

Bucky takes a shaky breath and angles the phone so she can't hear it. 

"Tell the boss to make sure his insurance payments are up to date. And don't mess with them, Nat. Promise me you won't."

It turns out she's right about the injury. It's just a shallow tear, edge of a ring catching the cheekbone maybe, and won't leave any more damage that some ugly bruising. Steve's alert when Bucky cleans him up. No sign of concussion yet.

What he doesn't like - really doesn't like - is how it brings something alive in Steve. Outside of the ring, the idiot probably hasn't been hit in the face since his cop days. There's the gleam in his eye now of a restless man presented with a greatly needed challenge. The fight isn't over, in his head. It's clear this was just round one and, having seen off two of them, he's itching for a bigger challenge.

And that's what he did to protect T'Challa's business. It's going to be an even bloodier disaster if he guesses what's on the line for Bucky personally.

He pats the washcloth gently over Steve's cheek, down into where the blood has trailed into his whiskers. It must have happened early in the fight, for the blood to spread that quick. First blow to the face, to disorient and disable, a broken nose if Steve hadn't been quick enough to deflect. Second blow to the gut to sap the strength and double him up. Get your target blow by blow nearer the ground, at the mercy of your feet, and keep him there. Bucky wishes he didn't know these things. 

"It's just dumb luck they weren't armed," Bucky lets out crankily when he can't hold it back anymore. "You know, that don't you?"

"Oh, the big one was, I'd say. From the way his buddy was pulling him away. Probably would have come out sooner, but he thought he could take me with his fists. Didn't expect me to be able to handle myself."

There's a surly kind of pride there, that Bucky's not used to. Oh Christ. It's hard to believe this is the same man who murmurs gentle check-ins in Bucky's ear while his hands tie their patient knots, pausing after each one to feel for discomfort or distress. Bucky has no fucking clue how to rein it in, this belligerent side of him, now that it's come to life. If he tried to explain to Steve how serious the danger is, it would only make him fight fiercer, he knows. And take the fight to them.

"Keep out of it next time," Bucky scowls as he trims the plaster to size, peels it and settles it over the gash. 

Steve lets out a breath that sounds like concession, as Bucky steps back. He rolls his shoulders stiffly. Looks like he's wrenched the left one, and he's carrying his whole torso gingerly, like he's going to be wearing bruises over his ribs tomorrow. 

"Sure," he says, looking Bucky in the eye with quiet obstinacy. "I'll step aside and let any asshole who wants to get his fists out bust into the place where all our friends work."

Bucky can see it so vividly it winds him. Where Steve's two biggest flaws meet, that sanctimonious streak and his sheer monolithic stubbornness, he is fucking unbearable sometimes, even to Bucky. His sense of personal inviolability is downright smug. That moral superiority, the side of him that thinks he's better because he can't let himself be worse, and simply cannot comprehend the fact that other people hold themselves to lower standards.

Christ, that's going to be a like a written invitation to people like Rattler, who respect no hierarchy except their own and live to bring proud men down to their level. Men like that, there's people they hurt for a reason – intimidation, or influence, or a lesson – that's what passes for their trade. But Steve is the type they'd hurt purely for the pleasure of it, and that means they won't stop when the task's complete. They'll keep on hurting him until they've ground that spark out completely, and there's only one way to do that. Steve, who walks through the world so gently, and expects the best of people, and is utterly unprepared for the moral code of men who've spent most of their lives on the pointy end of disadvantage and treat people with the same cold opportunism they expect to receive.

"Buck?" 

He pulls away from Steve's reaching hand and the alarm in his voice. The horror hits him so hard his knees want to buckle. If they ever got their hands on Steve, they'd break every part of him, not just his body.

"They're going to have to raise their security game at the club. And don't you fucking go back there until they do. Now put that ice on your face and go lie down."

He busies himself chucking bits and pieces back into the medikit, so he can turn his shoulder to Steve's concerned expression beside him. In prison, he only had himself to look out for, and that made him pretty free given how little he cared about himself through some of those years. But now, holy shit, now he's made himself so vulnerable he's practically helpless. And it was only a matter of time before Steve got involved too. He can't stay here. It's time to stop letting himself take the soft option. He can't stay.

**

He sits on the bed with the packed bag at his feet and tells himself to stand up and fucking leave. It's a bit over half an hour until Steve comes out of his session with Belle, maybe three hours before he finishes the session after that and notices the absence. Long enough to get a ride to the bus station and an overnight service heading out of the city.

He's not sure if he's strong enough to do it, this thing that would have been as easy as swiping left on an unwanted email, back when he first started to sleep here, when he expected failure as a certainty. But he's let himself get too soft since then, and develop hopes that a man like him had no business having. Today, it hurts everywhere, the thought of leaving all this behind and going back to nothing. Worse than the nothing he had when he walked out the prison gates, because when he walks out that door, he'll be carrying the memory of what he lost. 

The ring comes off his finger with difficulty, leaving his knuckle throbbing. It hasn't been off since Steve put it on him. He's only removing it now to make the sort of undebatable point he needs to make, and create a permanent severance that will keep Steve at a safe distance. But the thought of walking off into an unknown future without it is too fucking desolate. He remembers what he said to Daniel, that you've got to stand on your own two feet first. But he picks it up from the bedside table without even taking his fingers off it, and slips it back on. 

Steve's sketch pad is hanging off the far edge of the table. He picks it up to write a note. It’s only going to take one word. Sorry.

**


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky's so mad with frustration he wants to hit something – mad in the way only Steve can make him. He just can't seem to get it into Steve's head that all his sparkling principles aren't going to protect him against a skull fracture or a knife in the belly. With these kinds of men, you only get one chance, one slip-up, one moment of complacency. And in that one second your life changes, and after that, if you're not dead, all you've got in the world is time. You've got years like empty pages, to look back and regret.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone who's stuck with this story as it grew and grew, and then developed an actual (unexpected) plot right at the end. Thanks for all your feedback and patience and good thoughts.

Opening Steve's sketch pad already seems like crossing a line. It's something he never does, out of an old instinct for preserving hard-won privacy, even when he's shifting it off the table for lunch or dusting underneath it. He's only opening it now because if he doesn't grab the nearest blank paper to write on, his resolve is going to fail him again.

It's open to the current work in progress. Two tomatoes from last week's shopping run – the most marred and bulging of the lot, shape sketched blurrily with the detail just starting to emerge where the light catches a knitted, fawn coloured blemish. It makes him think of the first time he picked one up in a store after he got out. Held it in his hand, whole for the first time in twelve years, examining the pale little navel on top where it was once connected to a plant, and so uncomfortable with the familiar unfamiliarity of it that he put it back on the shelf and went to find a can instead.

Distracted, he flips through the pages, and flips the wrong way, back instead of forward. He pauses when his eye catches on a sketch so graceful it demands his attention. He opens the pad properly and turns it to landscape.

It takes a long moment to realise that it's him. Stretched out on his front with one arm bent under his cheek and the other tucked beneath him. It's clearly drawn from life. The repeated fan pattern of the bed linen is captured distinctly in the folds under his chest. He's fast asleep and the light is gentle, so it must be afternoon. His bare shoulders and the way he's facing the foot of the bed tell him he's being observed in the aftermath of sex, and it must have been good enough to knock him out for a half-hour of sketching.

There's no collar, no bondage accoutrements or any traces of them, but what makes the breath catch in his chest anyway is the vulnerability of it. His face is at peace, washed clean of those little everyday troubles and the heavier weight of his past. Steve has captured an innocence he's never imagined in himself. Right now, he can't believe he could look like that, or ever will again. 

The love in it is unmistakable. His back and his arm are lightly sketched in precise, gentle curves. The detail is all in his face, the soft curl of his eyelashes, the texture of his hair falling forward over his brow, the faint shadow of regrowth inside the line of his jaw. 

He closes the pad and puts it back where he found it. Writing a note would be almost as cruel as the fate he's trying to avoid, to a man who feels the way Steve feels. He's going to have to do this face to face, and find a way to convince Steve to let him go. 

**

Steve's not hyper attuned to detail as a daily habit, but he's got a finely honed instinct for danger and, when something sets it off, he goes from complacent to intensely focused in the space of a few heartbeats. Bucky watches him do it as he comes into the room and clocks the bag, clearly packed for more than just a couple of nights in a hotel to think things over. The tension comes into him. He draws himself up, shoulders assuming their full width.

The he waits, with that terrible grave expression that says he understands that this is weeks of unexplained tension finally coming to an irrevocable conclusion. 

"I'm sorry. I should have said no." That line between Steve's brows deepens as Bucky goes on. "When you said you wanted to get married. I should have told you no." 

Steve loosens his stance, as if to say _go on._ So Bucky explains, steering clear of any specifics that could tempt Steve to stick his nose into danger, but the more he says, the more dogged Steve's expression gets, as if he's just waiting for Bucky to run out of words so he can tell him how wrong he is.

"He'd been in and out a lot of times, Vacarro," Bucky insists. "Knew a lot of fellas, and they'll be out by now, some of them. They've gotta be all over the city. It's just dumb luck it took so long to meet one of them face to face. It's not gonna go away, Steve. You've gotta see that. There's only one thing I can do." 

Steve spends a long time with all the clean lines of his face bunched into consternation. 

"The only thing you can do is pack up and leave?"

Bucky refuses to let the challenge in that provoke him. "I'm the one who can't live in this city anymore. The problem is me. Not you. So yeah, the solution's kind of obvious."

The silence feels less and less like concession the longer it goes on. Eventually, Steve brings his hands together, holding his wedding band between finger and thumb, and meets Bucky's gaze at last.

"I guess no one ever talks about what these mean. Everyone just assumes. What it means to me is that there's no such thing as your problems anymore."

"You can't marry a maximum security prison, you idiot." Bucky pulls back the anger. This is too important to let his temper get away from him. "That's the baggage I've got. It's not just the shakes and the nightmares, it's not just the stuff you can put your arm around. This isn't what you signed on for."

Steve sits on the bed beside him, leaving a careful distance. When he folds himself over his knees, back hunched, it feels like Bucky's won.

"Okay." 

Then Steve's turning, and pressing something small and rigid into his hand, and Bucky's shocked to realise it's his wedding ring. As Bucky's fingers close over it, everything inside him gone numb. Of course Steve has the resolve to do what Bucky couldn't. But behind the relief, there's a depth of sadness even greater than he expected, at what he's doing to Steve, at what he's doing to this thing they've built between them. 

He feels himself slump. The only part of him with any strength left is the fingers clenched over that ring. He should put it in his pocket. He should reciprocate the gesture and finish this off. He can't. He just can't do it. 

"Now I know, Buck." Steve is speaking with that controlled patience he brings out of his work and puts on when he's got other things he needs to keep under control. "I know about all your baggage. I know you're not safe. And guess what? I still want to marry you. So put that ring back on me and let's sort this out."

Jesus fucking Christ, he's impossible. He's the most stubborn idealist on the planet and exactly the sort of person Bucky should have known better than to get entangled with. The harder he clings on to this, the more damage Bucky's going to have to do to pry him loose. But he's not going to lose his temper. 

"I can't do that. Should never have done it in the first place." 

His eye is drawn to Steve's hand, thumb pressing hard against the first knuckle of his pointer finger. He used to be less careful, when Bucky first met him. More spontaneous, faithfully following the instincts of his heart. The caution is something he learned from navigating the uneven terrain of Bucky's never-ending issues, the constant second-guessing, the never taking anything at face value. 

"That's not the way to do this," Steve replies eventually, still bent over, with a note of uncertainty creeping in now. "You and me. That's how we work it out. Together."

Bucky squeezes until he can feel the metal cutting into his palm. "This is too big to work out, baby. This is the kind of thing you just gotta keep away from. I tried everything I could think of already. And the only option left, it's to get on a bus and be somewhere else."

Steve swings around to face him, a sudden, decisive movement. "If you have to leave, then we leave together."

He's an idiot with a head full of romance. His whole life is here. This place he built, this business he built, this whole beautiful fucking life he built and let Bucky step into for a little while. It was part of what Bucky loved about him before everything else, how firmly rooted he was in his life, how certain he was of where he belonged. The last thing Bucky is going to do is take that away from him. 

"Come on." He tries a smile that probably comes out wan. "Could you make this easy?"

"Like hell I'm gonna make it easy, Buck. I'm going to do everything I can to make it hard. You walk out that door and I'll be right behind you. Every step. You think you can get rid of me by telling me it's dangerous, you're wrong."

Bucky knows that. The fading grey bruises and the scab on Steve's cheek tell that story.

The ring's starting to ache. As Bucky puts it down, Steve's gaze tracks it all the way until it seems like he can't stand being parted from it any longer. He pitches forward onto his knees and yanks out the bottom drawer and chucks papers and junk out of it until he finds a leather band. Then he threads it through the ring and fastens it around his neck, like the obstinate fucking idiot that he is. It disappears when he tucks it under the neck of his shirt. 

Bucky notes the weariness as he pushes himself to his feet. "We aren't done with this. But I'm too beat to work it out now. Let's talk in the morning. What? You weren't going to dump this on me and walk straight out the door, were you?"

Bucky can feel the muscles in his face shrink from the truth that's even worse. Steve must read it in his eyes, because he looks panicked for a second, and then furious, and then just crushed. "It's too late now," he says without looking at Bucky. "There's no buses leaving this time of night anyway."

There's one. The one that travels the furthest, heads south over more state borders than any of them. The one Bucky should be on. But Steve's looking at him blankly now, looking through him like he's gone already, out of reach. He looks like he used to look coming out of the worst sessions with Stuart, when he was questioning fundamental things about himself, and Bucky's got his shoes off before he can think. 

"It's not gonna look any different tomorrow," Bucky tells him, plain as he can, stripping his socks off and tucking them in his shoes for when they're needed. "You'll see."

Steve's fingers are rubbing the skin where the platinum band used to sit. 

"I don’t think I will, Buck."

They lie there a long time into the night, side by side. He knows Steve doesn't trust himself to go to sleep, in case he wakes up alone. Bucky doesn’t trust himself either, but he's too tired to keep going, and even if they're not touching, his body knows the warmth of Steve's presence far too well, and the rhythm of his breath. Eventually it drags him under. 

When he wakes up, the bag is nowhere to be seen and his clothes are back on their shelves. There's bacon frying on the stove. 

"I'm going to talk to some people," Steve says when he's setting the plate down on the bed.

"No," Bucky tells him. "You're not dragging anyone else into this. You could get them killed." 

He looks at Bucky hard, like it's only a matter of getting the right angle to see the solution that keeps everyone he cares about out of danger. Bucky knows all too well how pointless that is. 

It's too soon, is all. He needs to give Steve time to get used to it, until he sees, like Bucky did, that it's no kind of life for either of them, cramped inside these four walls. Until then, he can stay a few more days. 

He cups Steve's cheek with his hand, strokes the line of his cheek. "Promise I won't walk out the door without saying goodbye."

Part of him is sure he's making the wrong decision. If something happens to Steve, he's going to look back on last night and wish he'd been stronger. 

**

The last two days in the working week feel utterly unreal, but he keeps going through the motions because, wherever he washes up, he'll be glad of the money. At Friday's meeting, one of the team leaders from repossessions makes a thinly veiled complaint about how her numbers are down because of all the customers being put on repayment plans instead of terminated, and not long after he gets an email telling him they're rotating him to one of the corporate teams, but next week seems like someone else's life so he doesn't even reply to that. 

He works late and tries not to be in the house more than he has to, so that the ride home starts to feel the way it used to back into the beginning, like walking into an art gallery on a hot day, a temporary refuge and not a sanctuary for the likes of him.

On Saturday, Steve wants to take his usual stage at the club, and they have the kind of argument Bucky can't win even by breaking all the promises he made to himself and dangling the alternative of an evening in bed together instead. 

"And that's why I've gotta be there," Steve's saying for the fourth or the fifth time, and they're talking over each other now, tempers rising. "They're my friends."

"— because they're not gonna be targets. It's not personal. Not for --"

"Feels personal to me. It changed my life, that place. I've got debts there."

"Would it kill you to listen to me for one goddamn second?"

Bucky's so mad with frustration he wants to hit something – mad in the way only Steve can make him. He just can't seem to get it into Steve's head that all his sparkling principles aren't going to protect him against a skull fracture or a knife in the belly. With these kinds of men, you only get one chance, one slip-up, one moment of complacency. And in that one second your life changes, and after that, if you're not dead, all you've got in the world is time. You've got years like empty pages, to look back and regret. 

And it's pretty personal for him, too. Losing Steve would rip the bottom out of his world, but that's not the kind of thing he can put in words.

"Don't mess with these guys," is what he can say. "You think it's just one of them, but if you get on the wrong side of them, you'll find out there's ten others behind him. They stick together. When a man's got no work, no family, he's got all the time in the world to carry a grudge. Don't give them a reason to. Don't give them a face. Right now, it's just two fellas got knocked back on a busy Saturday and didn't like it. You gotta leave it there." 

He hasn't told Steve the worst of what he had to do to keep himself safe, in the years after he got sent down the second time for defending himself against Vaccaro. The pre-emptive strikes. The ugly wounds he learned to make with improvised weapons. The deliberate fights that got him sent to solitary time and time again, until he got word that whoever he was avoiding had been moved. Steve can't quite grasp that his own connection to Bucky puts him in danger, if Rattler ever works out there is one. So he just looks at Bucky sadly, and repeats it one last time.

"They're my friends. I've gotta be there."

With a growl of exasperation, he crosses the two steps between them and grabs Steve hard by the front of his jacket. He wants to shake the pride out of him, but before he knows what he's doing, he's pulling Steve in to kiss him – angry, sharp with teeth, but Steve's mouth opens for him anyway, until Bucky shoves him away.

"Don't get yourself killed, Rogers." 

"Got it," Steve repeats, looking pleased with himself now. "Don’t get myself killed."

The moment Steve's out the door, he burns off the frustration by hunting through the storage space on the other side of the building until he finds where Steve stowed his bag, just so he knows. He shakes the knives out of his coat and checks them over, one at a time. 

At eight thirty, his phone buzzes with a picture of the counter in the space Steve uses for a dressing room, empty at the time of night when Bucky would once have been setting down a drink there. _Service not what it used to be._ And a fucking love heart in red.

He puts the knives away and resigns himself to spending the evening curled up in an unhappy heap on the sofa, broken up only by the periodic buzz of Steve's texts coming in, one by one, telling Bucky he's alive.

**

The corporate team couldn't be less like the work he started out on. They work on insolvencies, which sounded exactly like repossessions on a larger and more depressing scale, except it turns out that there's a different kind of work involved when parts of the business are still viable. There's a lot of work to be done alongside the asset's management team, turning a merciless new eye on the inefficiencies in their systems and asking what can be economised. And the partner who runs the project, along with the two associates who are helping her, are so bogged down in spreadsheets and agency agreements and arguing about retention of title clauses that Bucky's left to the grunt work of sorting through archive boxes, and scouring rosters, and drinking coffee with middle managers.

He still wakes up in the dead of night wrapped around Steve like a net, and Steve strokes his arm and tells him it's going to be okay. 

But it isn't okay. In his stiff button-down and jacket, he sits in the back corner of the bus every morning, so he has sight lines and a wall at his back, and scans every face that gets on, keeping his breathing even and his limbs ready for anything. He forks out for a rideshare home so he won't have to go through the same ordeal in the dark.

He lives his life like he's balanced on a wire, wobbling every day, unable to put a foot down on one side or the other, but knowing he can't keep it up forever. 

One night he stays in the office so late he runs out of manuals to read, and since there's no one else around in his corner, he calls his dad. Seeing as he has nothing else to do but listen, he waits out the reticence and the determined silences, asking about the progress of the plants in his backyard, and the town's controversial new shopping mall, and his volunteer work, until he hits on the right question.

"Yeah, a fine mess that's turning into," George says, and pauses until Bucky pushes. "No money, no records, and no idea how to fix it."

Turns out that Ronnie, the woman who's been running the prisoner support group's administration almost single-handedly for a decade, having recently lost her youngest son to the meth habit that had trapped him in the prison system in the first place, moved back south to support her struggling parents, and, seeing as no one else has managed to wrangle the paperwork since she dropped off the radar, they're now facing the loss of their charitable status, which in turn will bring about the withdrawal of the meagre government grant that funds their website, printing and emergency assistance for newly released parolees.

It's basically the end of the line. George sounds as down as Bucky's heard him since they re-established contact. Without any point of reference over their 12-year estrangement, he's still wondered if the prisoner support work was the closest thing to a passion since his dad lost his business, lost his marriage, and succumbed through lack of other options to early retirement. 

"Let me look into it," Bucky says, tapping his screen back to life. "I picked up a bit of contract work for some accountants. Pretty low level. But they've got all these online libraries. Could be something in there that can help."

The promise is probably empty, and it earns him a couple of minutes fending off questions about a role he's most likely quitting on Friday. But for the first time, his dad gets animated, with curiosity and, carefully tucked within that, pride. 

One morning not long after, he's coming back from the shower when he catches Steve's voice outside the window, evidently taking a call as he locks up his bike after gym.

It's the uncharacteristic note of dissembling that catches Bucky's attention.

"I don't think so. Not so I'd noticed, anyway."

There's a deference there too, an implied _ma'am_ that means it's Winifred. But Bucky's phone is on the charger where he left it last night.

"How do you mean?" Steve says, dissembling again, though he should know better, because Bucky's mother has an uncanny instinct for reading people – it's an aptitude that Bucky knew enough to dread in his youth, and now just admires. 

There's a listening silence, then "I see," followed by the silence of putting words carefully in order. "We're just going through a bit of a rough patch," Steve tells her, sounding suddenly vulnerable. "Different ideas about what to do next. And he hasn't ... I guess he hasn't found his groove since he left the club." 

If it's still only half the truth, it's no longer obvious. Half a truth will have to do. His gut tells him Steve isn't going to share the bigger worry they carry every day, isn't going to burden a third person who can't do a single thing to fix it. It goes quiet for a while.

"Yeah," Steve says, almost too soft to hear. "But we'll get through it." 

There's the jangle of keys preparing for the padlock, then silence.

"I know that. And it goes both ways. I don't plan on losing him." 

Christ alive, Bucky thinks as he heads into the bedroom and quickly starts to get dressed. Steve's faithful heart is a fucking force of nature. He deserves better. 

By the time he's tying his hair back, he can feel Steve's gaze on him. Before he's even conscious of movement, he's already leaning to make space for the kiss Steve leaves on the side of his neck, both of them moving with the instinct of familiarity.

"Drink your coffee," Steve says just behind his ear, making the moment intimate in that way he has that just stops short of crowding. "Then I'll drive you to work."

His body responds to the thought of fifteen minutes pressed up against Steve's back before his mind can, and shivers finely. It's seven thirty and they'll both have helmets on. Bucky can't think of a single reason to say no.

**

When he hears about it, he goes in one lunchtime to see for himself. It's a good sign that the door of the club is locked where it used to stand open during the day. As he's scrolling through his phone for the bar number, the door opens and it takes him a moment to recognise the woman who comes out as Steve's monthly regular, Emma.

"Hey," Bucky says, puzzled, catching the door before it closes.

Dressed for the office but wearing a telling splash of colour in her face, Emma spares him a distracted smile and hurries off.

Even in the relative gloom inside, the grey frame of the metal detector is discernible. Clean and tucked close against the wall, it's not obtrusive enough to make the clientele feel unsafe, but someone with Rattler's background will be able to spot it from a mile off and read the message it sends. Along with the new cameras and the steel reinforcement on the door, it ought to be enough to give him second thoughts about targeting the club for the malice of it. So long as no one gives him a better reason to go after anyone who works here. 

It's the Black Widow who comes up from the dungeon, in jeans and a leather jacket, a more street-wise version of her Saturday night get-up. 

"How long has that been going on?" Bucky asks her.

There's a pause before she says, "Emma? Just a few weeks."

"Why'd she come to you?"

She shrugs. "Cap couldn't fit her in his diary anymore. Asked if someone else wanted the work, and it turns out the two of us suit each other pretty well."

It's nearly two months since he started to let his control of Steve's diary slip, but it wasn't overloaded last time he looked. Something about that seems off.

"Am I the one you should be asking about this?" she points out sharply before he can open his mouth. 

He attention catches on his old work station, giving him a pang of longing for the emptier but infinitely simpler life he used to have.

"Got time for a drink?" she asks. "Shuri's up in the office." 

He shakes his head, gaze still on the bar. "Gotta get back to work. Just wanted to check out the renovations."

"Well," she says warmly. "Who doesn't like a make-over?" 

He glances back to find her eyeing his corporate get-up approvingly, and the fraudulent feeling of the costume flusters him just long enough that she's turned up the stairs, heading for the office, before he can respond to the flirty undertone. 

When he gets back to the apartment as soon as work's done, it's empty, despite the fact that the diary has two bookings blocked in. He runs an income report to find that takings have dropped to nearly fifty percent of what they were two months ago.

Steve gets back well after dark, with his gym bag over his shoulder. 

"You're home early," he says brightly. "Had dinner yet? I'm going to cut up that chicken and put it in burritos or something."

His attention stops on the beer bottles on the table in front of Bucky. He sets down his bag.

Bucky realises abruptly that most of the questions on his mind are ones he lost the right to ask the night he made the decision to walk out the door – questions like _do I get to have an opinion on this?_ And _when were you going to tell me?_

He plays it safe and sticks to the facts. "How many clients have you cancelled?"

Steve leans back against the kitchen counter and folds his arms. "Some. The mortgage was ahead on payments. I can afford it. "

Then he stops, as if he stubbornly refusing to see where this is headed. 

"Why?"

Steve's upper arms tighten and flex out, a subtle defensive gesture. "They've got a complicated dynamic, some of them. And there are days I'm not in the right headspace to give them what they need."

He says that as if he hadn't been managing the exact same workload completely by himself, on top of an unexpected surge in social media notoriety and Stuart's toxic influence in the mix, when Bucky had met him. As if it wasn't obvious whose never-ending issues have wrung him out to the point he can't do his work anymore. Bucky picks up his remaining beer and sighs. 

"And that's not likely to change any time soon. Is it?"

His reprieve is over. It's time to stop giving in to excuses and make the move, before the poison of his past spreads to the career that's also Steve's calling in life.

"Maybe not," Steve says. "A change of direction could be good for me."

That's so ridiculous Bucky almost gags on his beer and has to put the bottle down. Steve is steadfast. Steve's constancy has been the foundation on which Bucky just rebuilt his relationship with the world, calm in the moments when Bucky's anger got the better of him, trusting no matter how ragged Bucky's faith grew, unwavering through all Bucky's months of doubt. He's been the shore that Bucky could break against, over and over again, as he worked out what shape his life might take in a world he'd been cut out of for more than a decade. Steve Rogers has been a rock to Bucky, and rocks don't shift. 

He's watching Bucky with an assessing, careful gaze. 

"Been thinking I might go back to Brooklyn. It's been six years. Time to give it another try." 

"And do what?"

Steve shrugs easily without losing that vigilance. 

"I'm pretty sure there's kinky people in New York. But I've got other options. I'll flip burgers if I have to. If that's what it takes."

"But all this-" He flicks his eyes to acknowledge everything Steve has built here. 

"Real estate. It's made to be bought and sold."

The return of hope is like an ache in a limb that's spent a long time numb. He's not ready for it. He doesn't want it at that cost.

"No. Your clients need you." Steve's cheek twitches guiltily at that. "You've got a whole life here."

After a few moments, Steve picks up his gym bag as if putting the conversation on hold, with that inch-by-inch care he learned for Bucky's sake. "I've started over before, and for worse reasons," he says, heading for the bedroom. "How about you chop some salad for those burritos?"

For a while he just sits there, mulling over the magnitude of what Steve just put on the table, and reminding himself why it's impossible. 

Then he gets up to see to dinner. He's barely washed the lettuce when Steve returns to put the frypan on the portable hotplate and settle the second chopping board over the sink to create enough space for them to work elbow to elbow. From the corner of his eye, Bucky watches him slice the chicken into strips and then cubes, with that precise determination he brings to anything worth the trouble of his attention. It reminds him how they built a working rapport out of nothing, falling into intuitive teamwork with Steve making the space for Bucky's strengths to find their way in his business, long before the attraction sparked between them. 

They work in silence for a while. 

"It's funny," Steve says quietly as he slides the knife under the chicken pieces and transfers them to the pan, where they sizzle fiercely then settle. "I spent most of my life cooking for one." He looks thoughtful as he tears the sachet of spices and empties it on top. "Can't remember how I did it now." 

And that's another thing Bucky can't forget. The sense of Steve walking around in a bubble and not knowing how to let someone else in for longer than the ninety minutes of a paid session. Not until he took on a part-time employee and got a whole lot more than he bargained for. 

Bucky puts his knife down and looks at him while all the implications of those simple words go off in his heart like grenades. The realisation sinks in deep. He's not going anywhere. As long as Steve needs him, he can't.

The removal of choice is a weight off his shoulders.

He takes a half-step back and shifts behind Steve, watching the attentive swish of his eyelashes and the play of tendons down his neck as he stirs. It's easy to skim his hand under Steve's shirt, rubbing over the muscle of his belly that tenses lightly in response. He pulls Steve back against him. 

"It's going to be a shitty excuse for a life, baby." He kisses Steve's shoulder through the cotton, and stays there, voice vibrating into his flesh. "Every day like a prison. And you've gotta be careful all the time. No second chances."

"I know," Steve says, deep in his throat. "Buck, I know."

The stirring stops and he leans back in Bucky's arms. Steve always smells delicious after the gym, the healthy, animal scent of him breaking through the freshness of the shower. New sweat and faint pine. Bucky breathes him in deep and squeezes. Steve responds to that by grabbing his wrist and directing his attention south, until his fingers can trace the soft bulge of Steve's dick that perks up just a little at the touch. One of the things he loves about Steve is how raw he is in his sexuality. He's asking for sex, sure. But he's asking for a lot more than that too. 

"Seems like you need to turn off the heat," Bucky tells him and, with a breathy laugh, he does. 

Sometimes Bucky wants the same things, simplicity, connection, forgetfulness. Steve pulls towards the bedroom, but Bucky tugs him the other way. "Mm-mm. I wanna make a mess of you."

Steve sighs like that's the best idea he's heard all week. And it is a mess. They're both wound up, and it's been a while since they did it this way. It's hard work to get him to open up enough, and he's excruciatingly tight as Bucky pushes into him. The urgent murmurs of encouragement end abruptly in a long held breath. But then the last resistance gives way, and when he glances up to meet Bucky's eyes in the mirror, the satisfaction on his face, Jesus he looks like the one who's got exactly what he wanted. He braces against the mirror and pushes back until Bucky's sunk in as far as he can go. And that moment, Christ that's sexy, the electric gaze between them, Bucky with his shirt open, Steve stripped down to nothing with all the beautiful breadth of his bare shoulders spread out, offering himself up. Bucky pulls back slow, feeling out the clench and surrender of Steve's muscles around him, the pulse of his cock against that hot grip. When he slides in, unrelenting, Steve's eyes flutter closed and stay that way as Bucky clutches his hips and drives into him properly, stepping up the pace until the platinum band on its chain around Steve's neck starts to clink against the basin with every thrust. 

Even then, he's letting out eager little grunts like he wants more, so Bucky gives it to him, grateful to the last neuron in his skull that biology gave them this mechanism for connection, for banishing all the troubles that pull them apart and drenching their senses with sex chemicals until they can't hear or see or feel anything except each other.

Steve's stroking himself now, so Bucky eases up to let him, and it's not long before he's panting with it, pulling himself over the edge and – Christ – he looks so helpless and lovely every time. Bucky can't stand it anymore. He pulls out to get his fist on himself and then it's a short, tight sprint to the finish line, spurting over the small of Steve's back. It's one of those orgasms that's like a blow to the back of the head. He crumples from the waist up, sinking down until he plants his face between Steve's shoulder blades, nosing against the sweat-slick skin while they both try to get their breathing under control. There's only one place they can go from here, but even the shower seems too far away, so he stays where he is, skin to skin with the best man he's ever met. 

"Chicken's gonna be dry," Steve says hazily, after a while. 

Bucky laughs helplessly, right up against his ribs. "Honey," he says. "That is the least of your fucking problems right now."

**

He pulls a blank A3 sheet out of the printer and spends an entire morning carefully mapping out the travel agent's processes and reporting lines, as far as he can figure them, in pencil first and then in more confident ink, with red circles for staff and blue arrows for cashflow, and wonders how the hell his life turned into this bizarre combination of clerical drudgery and junior school art project. But when he's finished, it feels clear in his mind for the first time. 

He pins it to the side partition of his cubicle, and goes to make a coffee, and when he comes back, the chart has vanished. When he looks around, Ajay catches his eye and nods towards the corner office, cautiously. In it, he finds Deborah, the partner managing the project who has never spoken to him outside of meetings. She's got the page spread out on her desk, transcribing figures from her screen below the blue arrows so rapidly that it takes almost a minute before she looks up to see him there. 

"Thanks," she says as if he'd made it at her request. She glances down, then up again, with her finger on a cluster of dots. "Did they explain why they need five people on their accounts team?"

"Two of them are part time. But yeah. They need a specialist for the foreign exchange. The others are mostly agency commissions and managing the transit moneys."

"Could be outsourced," she says, half to herself, as she goes back to her figures. 

There's a bottle of wine waiting for him on his desk the next morning. The silver carry bag it's in is slightly dusty in a way that makes him think it might be regifted. But he knows the French label from the club, and it's definitely top shelf. 

**

He opens it as soon as he gets home. The bottle is almost empty when Steve's phone chimes with a text, and that's probably the only reason Bucky finds out. He's got his bare feet in Steve's lap and his arm dangling the empty glass draped over the back of the sofa, and all the time in the world to watch the expressions flit over Steve's face. Alarm. Anger. Deliberate blankness.

"What is it?" he asks.

Steve makes a dismissive shape with his mouth and reaches for the bottle. 

Bucky nudges his belly gently with his toes. "Hey. Don't make me come and grab that off you. What is it?"

"You'll make it a bigger deal than it needs to be."

"All right, then give me the rest of that first."

He holds his glass out for the last of the wine. 

"One of the windows at the club got broken," Steve says lightly as he pours. "Just a window. Not the first time it's happened."

It could be an accident. It could be a random act of vandalism. Bucky knows it probably isn't.

**

The next week there's a lot of creditor meetings on the big insolvency matter – not that Bucky gets to do anything in them other than sit in a corner and take notes of terminology and sections of legislation he's going to look up afterwards. 

After yet another late night, he comes home to find music playing, and a pile of books on the table forming a makeshift easel. At which Bucky's niece is painting a respectably accurate picture of a cactus, in the timeslot that, according to the calendar, Steve should be spending in the office with Kieran. Instead, Steve is standing a bit behind her, watching patiently with his arms crossed. The whole scene is so incongruous that Bucky takes a while to find his tongue.

"You're running art classes now?" he manages eventually. "Hi Lil."

"Don't look," she says hurriedly, losing a little of the calm focus she'd worn earlier. "It's not finished yet."

"All right then." 

In the bedroom, he tries to pin down the unease that the surprise visit has left in him. He takes his shoes off, but leaves the knife in his pocket, instead of slipping it into his coat hanging on the rack like usual. 

While he waits for the kettle to boil, he watches her surreptitiously as she studies the plant that's been moved from the window sill to the table and tries to capture the fine stripes of needles that form vertical bands down its length. 

"Want me to show you a neat trick with the other end of the brush?" Steve offers as Bucky's pouring two cups of the peppermint tea he's come to depend on as an antidote to the day's caffeine. "You have to do it while the paint's still wet."

When he passes the brush back to her, Bucky replaces it with a mug of tea, and cocks his eyebrows expectantly.

"Last minute work thing. They couldn't get any of their usual sitters at short notice. She said she called you first."

He tugs his phone out and sure, there's three missed calls there that must have come in during that last meeting that ran over.

"But what about –" 

He looks again at the blanket pile in the corner of the sofa and this time notices the outline of sleeping almost-four-year-old beneath it. His hand has crept back into his pocket, seeking the reassurance of cool metal, when Lily says without turning,

"I think it's finished. Is it okay?"

With the pale lines of needles etched out of the wet paint, it's as good as any art Bucky ever did. "It's pretty great," he tells her. 

"Really?" she asks, as if the actual self-trained artist wasn't standing right next to him.

"Looks spiky enough to sting. He feed you, kid?"

Her face takes on a calculating look that makes him laugh. So he digs out that half block of chocolate from the back of the cupboard and melts it so they can dip strawberries in it, and then it's ten and Becca and Mark are at the door. 

When he comes back from waving them off, he finds Steve sitting on the side of the bed, stripped down to his underpants already. Bucky's torn between helpless affection and the resurgence of that nauseating fear.

He takes Steve's face lightly between his palms. "What do I have to do to make you listen to me?" He leans down to kiss Steve, soft, as if that might drive it home. "I don't want them near this. I put my family through enough already. Please don't bring them round here again."

Steve's hands grasp his waist, sliding luxuriantly over the weave of his shirt and the muscle beneath. 

"Next time, pick up your phone, and then we can have this argument before they come over instead of after. They're good kids and I'm kind of in love with their uncle. Now come here and do that again." 

When he kisses Steve, a little more lingering this time, the ripple of tender feeling it sends through him is completely unfair. Steve starts making soft little noises like he hasn't had Bucky's mouth on him in a year, but Bucky makes himself pull back.

"There's a guy called Tom Murphy in the system somewhere. Blind in one eye. You know how that happened?"

He doesn't know if he can make himself tell that story, how he dumped the plastic shiv in a toilet cistern, and tore the fabric of his shoe trying to scrub the flecks of blood out, and then got so scared of making himself defenceless he went and fished it out anyway. 

He doesn't get a chance to, because Steve's expression hardens. "I know you lost too damn much in that place. You're not losing anything else out here. Not if I get any say in it."

Then he's got his hands on Bucky's belt with the determined look that usually foreshadows a half-hour of passionate oral sex, and Bucky's fears get pushed into the background again.

**

He's using his lunchbreak to search for loopholes in the state's audit rules for not-for-profits, sparked off by his dad's having casually mentioned that his prisoner support group is down to the last $100 in their account, when a call comes in from the office at the club. He slips into an empty meeting room to take it.

"James Barnes," says Shuri. "I hope you can spare me a minute of your time in the middle of carving out your career in corporate accounting." 

He fights off the uneasiness of hearing her voice in an unexpected place. 

"Everything all right?" he asks a bit tightly. 

"No more broken windows, if that's what you're asking. And we would like to keep it that way. Which is why I have some questions about your former colleague, Mr Blake."

That's the name the guards called Rattler – had he mentioned it to Steve in one of those late-night conversations in the wake of a nightmare? She wants to know his first name (no idea) and what he was sentenced for (a bank in the early 2000s, he remembers, a female guard shot in the neck and left to bleed out, and plenty of other felonies he wasn't shy of recounting when he wanted to put someone in fear). Then she asks where he's living.

"No way," he tells her, and nudges the meeting room door closed to cover his raised voice. "You do not need to know that information. You stay away from him and any place that has anything to do with him. Hear me? He is not the kind of feller you mess with."

There's a thoughtful silence, and then, "I will take your advice to heart, James, and any messing will be done by the State's Attorney's office where a friend of my friend did an internship over summer."

They have an argument that eats up the rest of his lunch break.

It's not a patch on the argument waiting for him at home. It's the worst fight of their marriage, a whole other dimension of bitterness, and it just won't quit, flaring up over three days without ever appearing to make one inch of progress in either direction.

"I'm not gonna let this thing beat us," Steve insists sometime on the second day when Bucky finds a couple of firearms websites in the laptop's search history and loses his temper completely.

"You bring a gun into this house over my—"

"—can't ask me to walk away from this—"

"Yes you had better walk the fuck away from this."

Their voices are clashing, trying to drown each other out. It makes Bucky's head hurt when they talk to each other this way.

"I'm gonna fight for you, Buck. I'm gonna fight for us."

Bucky hates the way his heart responds to the passion in that dumb idea. 

"Gee, Steve. Ever occur to you I might have seen enough fighting for one lifetime? D'you ever think I might be really fucking sick of it?"

Since Steve's answer is nothing but a wounded expression, he pushes on.

"And maybe what I need from you right now isn't to run into this like a goddamn cowboy and make an ugly situation even worse."

Steve goes back to separating whites from colours so belligerently that, if he was handling anything other than soft linens, something would break. 

"We're a team," he says, his whole face clenched in a frown. "And when someone threatens my team, I've gotta get my hands dirty."

Damn it, his appeals to honour and justice make Bucky sicker each time, because sure, no one should give in to bullies, but Bucky has spent twelve years having every illusion about the justice system stripped away from him, and he knows those platitudes about moral rightness are only going to get this beautiful quiet life they've built crushed before their eyes.

"The hell you think a team is, Steve? Am I even on this team, or is just you and your goddamn hero complex?"

Apparently, there's a place Steve gets to that's beyond anger, where he goes so quiet that Bucky's afraid he's broken something he can't put back together again afterwards.

"You think I want it to turn out like this?" Steve says hoarsely, a little later. "You think I want to have a gun in my hand again?"

Since he can't say that he's not completely convinced on that question, Bucky bites his tongue. That night, he falls asleep with a careful distance between them, and wakes up where he always does, crowded onto Steve's side of the bed with a clammy sweat all over him, heart thumping in his ears.

Breakfast isn't even done before he's on the receiving end of the next diatribe about standing up for what you believe in. With a gesture of resignation, he waits for it to be done.

"All you're doing is shaking up a hornet's nest. And pretty soon, someone's gonna get stung."

"He can't hurt anyone if he's back in jail. Shuri's friends say there's other crimes they were looking at him for, and it only takes one of them to get him sent back down."

"What you don't get," Bucky begins as softly as he can, "is that a win is never a win with these people. Sure, you might beat one of them today, but you know what the prize for that is? It's spending the next ten years looking over your shoulder every minute of every day, waiting for the time they get back at you. And it will happen. There's always a buddy or some eager kid who'll do it for them. Even in there, there were ten different places a man could be carrying a weapon he could kill you with. And out here – out here, Steve, it's worse. It's no kind of life. I don't want that for you. Or me."

Steve pokes at the congealed egg on the plate in front of him and pushes it aside. "I'm not going to let this slide. That's not the way I'm made. We'll find a way."

"Let this one slide," Bucky says "You've gotta let this one slide." 

He wants to add, _For me._ But he can't quite say the words because, deep down, he's not sure he can stand it if he puts that on the line and Steve keeps saying no. 

**

Apparently Will is one of the few clients whose sessions haven't been cut back at all. A privilege of being a part owner of the building, perhaps, or, more likely, the playful delight he brings with him every time. Steve goes into the session wound up tight after a dinner eaten in silence. If he isn't searching over-the-counter weapons from the laptop anymore, there's a guilty hunch of his shoulders each time he bends over his phone. But after his time with Will, after ninety minutes of discipline and a leisurely chat over tea, he comes into the bedroom as light as a feather, bare-chested with his hair damp.

He's still as handsome and solid as a living statue, and all Bucky can think is how much he's got to lose. Reaching for his phone, he taps his music onto something brighter and cranks the volume in his earbuds, and tries to focus on the bills on the screen in front of him. 

Shuri hasn't called again, but he doesn't think she's abandoned her dangerous interference the way he demanded. Two days ago, he dropped into the club at lunch, hoping for a quiet word in T'Challa's ear, but the door was locked and no one answered. And then this morning his news feed popped up with two young men chased through a shopping mall and arrested in a drug bust that turned up unlicensed firearms and jewellery. He has a sinking feeling it's connected to Rattler. Between them, she and Steve are going to bring down a reckoning they are completely unprepared to deal with.

Bucky is going to have to deal with it. Events are closing off doors on either side of him, leaving him just one path to walk. He doesn't know who Rattler's got behind him, or what his resources are, but Bucky is going to have to take the fight to him, do as much damage as he can, and hope it's enough. 

Steve flops onto the bed beside him and looks up expectantly. 

It's not the sort of fight Bucky expects to come back from. One way or the other, however it ends – in a body bag, or back behind bars – it's not with him walking triumphant back into this charmed and gentle life.

Bucky pulls out one ear bud.

"I got pretty charged up in there," Steve tells him with a glint in his eyes. "Think you could help me work some of it off?"

He's so beautiful Bucky can't stand to look at him. But at the same time, he can't bear to turn away.

"Think I'm gonna work on paying some of your debts instead. You go ahead though. Do what you need."

After a pause, Steve leans in to kiss his arm. "You wanna watch?"

As open as ever, his face is full of hope, as if, despite everything, his pleasure is still one more thing they take care of as a team.

"Can't." It comes out strangled as Bucky squashes his earbud back in and turns swiftly back to the laptop on his knees.

He's dimly aware of Steve pulling a book off the table beside him, and he holds it open in front of him, even if the pages don't turn. 

That night, Bucky sleeps without nightmares. Everything is ordered in his dreams, one step after another. 

**

The next day at work, he manages to get Lee-Anne to assign him back to debt collection, where he knows he can work briskly through his list by noon and buy himself some time to put all his records from the last few weeks' work in order, and sort his emails into sub-folders, and clear out the stray private files from his personal drive. He notes with satisfaction that he doesn't recognise any of the names on this week's repossession list as customers he put on payment plans.

Then he checks the database of resumes on the marketing drive until he tracks down two partners and an associate who have done some work advising charities, and first thing after lunch he's knocking on the door of the one whose work with homeless shelters indicates the most likely to have a social conscience.

"You work d some work on Deb's team for the Roam insolvency," Michael Kosminski says. "I heard that's going well."

Ignoring the half-concealed note of surprise, Bucky tells him, "Sure," and sketches out the situation with his dad's prisoner support group as plainly as he can. 

Under the stiff tailoring, he looks young enough to slip into the dance clubs that Bucky frequented in better days, though there's a framed photo of a toddler at his elbow and the pinched tension of exhaustion around his eyes, but he listens.

"Has someone been skimming money out?" 

"No. Just too much paperwork and no one getting paid to do it."

Michael's answer is confident and quick.

"Put together a good record of which payments you've got receipts for and which ones are missing. If it's not more than a few hundred, you'll probably be fine. Then call the regulator. Come clean, say you're sorry, and make sure to have the updated paperwork ready to submit before you make the call. They've got too much on their plate to chase up every missing receipt." 

It's like he's pulled out a cigarette lighter, when Bucky just spent two weeks messing around with damp logs and a worn chunk of flint. It can't be that simple, if Bucky knows anything about the world.

"If you run up against questions you can't answer, let me know." 

Bucky notes how his tone makes it clear the free advice is over, without seeming unfriendly about it. 

"Thanks. I appreciate it." 

When he's in the doorway, Michael adds, "And ask Anna to set up a new file number for you." 

"What?" Bucky turns at that. "No, they can't afford to pay for it." 

He's already turned back to his screen, talking as he types. "You want liability cover and credit for the hours you put in? You want to open a file. Anna can put you in touch with the pro bono team." 

He finds Anna at an admin desk back in the maze of partitions. He sets up the file. When he's done for the day, he gets some more details from his dad, then puts in a call to the regulator where an officious and very unhelpful representative makes it clear that she doesn't think it's as simple as that, either. 

After that, he has a drink with Natasha, following up on a suspicion that's occurred to him once or twice, and asks her about putting him in touch with people who can get him a firearm without asking questions. She gives him a long look with a little disappointment in it, and doesn't promise anything, but she says she'll look into it. 

Once he meets her contact, it won't take more than a day or two to get what he needs. On the way home, he picks up the olive oil they're almost out of, and then he can't see any good reason not to add a wedge of that cheese with the crumbled truffle in it, and a little wheel of camembert, and the stupidly expensive imported hot salami that Steve likes. At the rack by the counter, he picks up a tiny box of saffron that costs the same as a four pounds of tomatoes and will last more than a year at the rate Steve uses it in that fancy beef stew he makes. The picture comes to him of Steve dropping four or five precious golden strands into a steaming pot, a year down the track, cooking for one, or maybe not, and he puts it back where he found it. 

He adds a bottle of cheap vodka instead, and lets himself take a slug straight from the bottle out on the street, with the Friday evening crowds blurring around him.

**

On Saturday morning, things start to seem weird, like he's acting out scenes in a life that doesn't belong to him anymore. There's a text on his phone saying Natasha's got a guy can meet him Thursday night, in the front room of a bar. The busy location makes him think she doesn't trust one of them, and he hopes it's not him. He sits up in bed and thinks there's going to be a last time, soon, for him to do that familiar act, of sitting up in sheets still warm from Steve's body, and deciding whether to wait in bed for his return, or get moving.

He gets moving. The little kitchen area is neat enough for the end of the week, but he wipes it down anyway and puts a few dishes back in place, and cleans under the draining rack. He drips water onto the succulents on the window sills.

He looks at himself in the bathroom mirror and, noticing a hollow cast to his cheeks, decides not to shave. As the weight of hot water from the rain shower strikes his head and shoulders, he can't help thinking that time's running down on that little pleasure, too. A bit later, there's the familiar sounds of Steve's bike pulling in, doors opening and closing, purposeful steps on floorboards, and he finds a fleck of suds on the tiles to clean off so he doesn't have to think about the time limit on that, too.

Eventually he's dressed, tied his wet hair back, and dug out one of those samples from the overpriced grooming store to massage into his face, and run out of reasons to stall. 

When he comes out of the bathroom, Steve's sitting on the sofa, wearing an expression so deeply shell-shocked that Bucky gives the whole room another look, in case he'd missed an intruder lurking in a corner. Then he sees what's on the coffee table. Bucky's pants that he'd kicked into a corner when he stumbled into bed last night. And the flick knife that would have been in the right pocket. And the two other knives from the sleeve of his winter coat, that Steve would have had to turn the whole bedroom upside down to find. 

The table's sitting a little apart from the sofa, as if he'd needed to keep the weapons at a distance, but one of his hands is clenched into the sofa cushion.

"The hell, Bucky? I thought you were done with all that."

He wishes he didn't know how bad it hurts to let Steve down. Guilt flows over him in waves, with anger hot on its heels.

"I was, until my husband decided to go pick a fight with one of the meanest gangs in the city. That put things in a different light."

"That's not—"

"It's a death wish. That's what it is, Steve, like I've been telling you from the start. So don't be surprised that I've been thinking about how to stay safe."

He's looking at Bucky like he doesn't recognise him. As if he's been so focused on his personal battle with all the threats from Bucky's past that he's forgotten that Bucky, too, is a threat. These things are literally written in Bucky's criminal record, as it seems that Steve is only now remembering. 

"This is a bit more than thinking."

"It's a better version of the shit I carried every day I could for ten years. I know how to handle a blade." 

"And it stops there, does it? It stops at knives?"

There's that tone that's a shade past suspicion. He shouldn't have gone to Natasha. She's smart, and there's a lot of unexpected loyalty in her complex relationship with Steve. 

It stops when he stops Rattler from ever being able to hurt anyone he cares about, and the question of what weapon he has to use to do it doesn't bother him any more than the choice between grey socks or black. But he's not going to be able to put that in any way Steve can accept.

"Look," he says, scooping up the flick knife, the smallest, as he passes, and heads to the bedroom for his wallet and sneakers. "I only carry one at a time."

He spends the next three hours at the gym, switching from room to room when he needs to get out from under Sam's vaguely disapproving gaze and grateful he's too busy to follow Bucky into the showers to deliver whatever moral judgment is on his mind. Still, it's good to be reminded that there's lots of people who'll have Steve's back when he needs it. 

When it's late enough for the bars to start opening, he scopes out the place where he's meeting Nat's contact next week and then, since he's only a couple of blocks away, he pulls his cap down hard over his brow and heads towards the strip clubs and seedy hotels and cheap tattooists where Rattler and his crew most likely do a bit of their business. After what winds up as a waste of an afternoon, he gets home to find Steve's already left for his club shift, so he picks up the knives from the table and works them hand to hand. There's something comforting in the rhythm. Swing, release, catch. Toss, catch, slice, strike. Every time his fingers close around the handle, he gets more confident. He's good, but good isn't going to be enough with these people. He needs to get it perfect. Three hours later, when he stumbles into bed, head pounding, he thinks he's close. 

**

He wakes up when Steve slides under the sheets beside him, home from the club early. That night, Steve's the one holding him, arm curled over Bucky's ribs like he's trying to make his whole body into a shelter. And god help him if his sub-conscious hasn't come to associate Steve's presence so deeply with comfort that he's fallen back under in two blinks, and he doesn't remember anything until Steve wakes him in the grey light of dawn.

"Buck," he's murmuring against Bucky's ear as he shakes him gently. "C'mon baby. Time to get up."

There's faint caution behind the reassuring tone. Bucky sits bolt upright. "What is it?"

"Got a plane to catch. I'm doing a trial session at a club in Manhattan. Come on. I'll put coffee on while you pack."

Bucky squints as the overhead light goes on, and lets it turn into a scowl. "I can't go to New York. I got work tomorrow."

"I know. Call in sick. Just this once. I really want you to be there."

There's no need to look at him to know what's on his face. How much it costs him to ask for something selfish, when care-taking is a transaction he always expects to be on the other end of.

Bucky scrubs his hand over his eyes. Apparently it's not a dream. Steve has really organised this stupid thing, and there are so many reasons Bucky should say no. New York is a grand romantic gesture, not a practical future for someone whose identity is so deeply rooted here, in the club where Steve found the missing puzzle pieces of his sexuality and started his long road back to connecting with a world that had let him down. But fuck it all, Bucky's had enough of watching this beautiful thing they built slip out of his grasp. He can't do anything until Thursday anyway. If life is offering him a few days to lose himself in Steve and forget what's in front of them, he's not strong enough to say no. 

"You went ahead and booked the flights already. Didn't you?"

"What do you think?"

It's only as he's emptying his pockets on the way out the door, still only half awake, that he realises part of the appeal for Steve is probably that they have to go through metal detectors in both directions.

**

He hasn't been on a plane since that big festival he went to with Jesse. The airport formalities are less aggravating than he remembers, or maybe he's had a little schooling in patience since those days. The seats are a tight fit for his arms now, especially in the middle seat, squeezed up against the perpetually affectionate gym junkie sitting next to him. 

Something in him relaxes as the wheels come off the ground, something that hadn't quite believed he'd be allowed to get away.

When he glances Steve's way, he's leaning back with his eyes closed and an expression of deep satisfaction, like he hasn't realised he's going to spend the whole flight getting his elbow knocked by the drinks trolley and every restless passenger.

"Never saw someone look so happy to be sitting in the cheap seats."

Steve slits one eye open to look at him. "Feels like I'm headed in the right direction. That's all."

With hard-won self-discipline, Bucky holds himself back from debating that. Instead, he watches the gold light from the low sun stroke shadow patterns over Steve's skin as the plane tilts onto its flight path.

"I'd better get used to this," Steve murmurs. "I'm thinking I could come back a couple of times a month and see some clients. There's space free at the club early in the week, and Tony doesn't mind the idea of having me around more."

It takes Bucky's sleepy brain a little while to catch up with how much planning he's put into this idea already, and the surprise is not welcome. "How are you going to afford that on top of New York rent?"

Steve opens his eyes and plucks the safety card out of the seat pocket to occupy his hands. 

"I'll have to go back on the books for a while. But that's okay. It'll just take time to build up my own client base again. And until that happens, luckily I'm married to an up-and-coming hot shot in distressed asset restructuring."

Since almost every word of that is blind optimism, without the slightest foundation in the real world, Bucky doesn't even know where to start. So he slumps back in his seat and decides to try and catch up on a bit of the sleep he missed. 

"Hey," he says later, once he's got a second coffee in him. "Am I going up on stage with you? Is that what I'm here for?"

"Do you want to?" Steve asks with an air of reluctance, and Bucky's fired up by such a fierce surge of resistance to that that he has to put his answer on hold and think it through. And on reflection, no, he doesn't think he could do the things he does with Steve in front of an audience, and he doesn't want to.

"No."

"Good. Then you're here for a holiday, and tonight you can just sit in the audience and watch."

And that's exactly what Bucky does.

The club's fancy, covering three floors of what used to be an office building, with two security guards and a severe looking hostess in the lobby to buzz approved visitors up to the reception floor. The music's louder than T'Challa had it, and the clientele are dressed in a clever combination of tailored leather and bare flesh that's got one foot on the fashionable streets outside and the other firmly in fetish territory. Even in the bar on the entry level above the play rooms, there's a lot of masks going on, and it's hard to tell whether anonymity is a usual fixture of the place. 

The vibe is serious and edgy, with none of Tony's concessions to curious suburbanites. The first session on stage is pony play, and the slowly building crowd receives it with lukewarm attention. The horse mistress's vigorous crack of the whip is barely enough to turn heads at most of the bar tables, and the shadowy corners where some of the night's hook-ups are already underway don't respond at all. 

When Steve strides into the lights, he's as comfortable here as anywhere else Bucky's ever seen him, and Bucky's heart aches for him, thinking this jaded crowd isn't going to give him a chance. But he should know better. Steve stands in front of a projection of that blurry cell phone photo that did the rounds on social media and kicked off his notoriety, and discards the mic pinned to the lapel of his black jacket to speak in his natural voice. The music drops down to accommodate him, and the standing crowd shuffles closer. He picks what appears to be a volunteer from the crowd, who's quite happy to be stripped down to her sapphire blue underwear and tied to a chair while Steve arranges her limbs like a tricky art installation and keeps up a gentle commentary about the importance of _quality materials_ and finding new ways to _strip them back to their elements._ Apart from the rope and the chair, the only implement he brings on stage is a feather, and when he reattaches the mic, the whole room can hear the intensified pleasure of her reaction to that, after a quarter-hour under the influence of Steve's hands and the hungry attention of the crowd. 

When Steve steps down off the stage afterwards, the crowd makes a show of nonchalance, but Bucky can see one or two of them darting curious glances his way. Then a reedy young man with a glistening bare chest and a defiant way of carrying himself steps forward with a question, and Steve shakes his hand and smiles like he means it, and after that, Bucky watches other people edge onto his trajectory and lurk where they can waylay him without looking too keen.

Since he can see the next demonstration features blades, he takes himself back out to the bar, orders a drink, and stands against the wall by the speakers where he can let the bass thump into his bones. God, it's been too long since he did this. Soon he's soaking it up like a junkie, the vibration of the crowd energy and the music. He knocks his drink back as the song switches, faster beats with a brass line climbing up through them, and his feet start to move of their own accord, rocking his body along with them. His eyes sink closed, letting the rhythm wash through him like waves, and there it is. Time falls away, taking the past and future with it. The world's as small as the next four beats, everything he needs contained within it. For the first time in a long time, he feels like himself. 

When he opens his eyes, there's a woman watching him curiously from across the room, white blonde hair carefully styled into high rockabilly bangs. Instinctively he holds out his hand towards her, and she comes. She's sure on her feet, clearly experienced in some sort of partnered dancing because she's adept at signalling when she wants him to spin her out, or pull her close, or just make space for her own practised moves. When the music switches to a growling rock number that's not made for dancing, they both smile ruefully and fall still. She's still got one hand in his, and he's wondering how long it takes to get that perfect curl of kohl at the corner of her eye when he catches sight of Steve, stopped in the doorway to watch. 

"I told them I'm pretty beat from the flight," Steve says in his ear a few moments later. "Gonna come back in tomorrow and talk it over. You ready to hit the road?"

The long day hits Bucky like a sack of bricks at that point, and god is he ready. Outside, he follows Steve's lead through the unfamiliar streets, while Steve plots out futures like lazy afternoon sketches, what he thinks would work in that place, what wouldn't, the tips he's picked up from Natasha from her appearances here. He's charged up in a way Bucky hasn't seen for a while, and he can't tell if it's the city, or finding a room full of new erotic energies to connect with. It's funny to think the fetish scene was here the whole time Steve lived in Brooklyn, and yet he would never have set foot in a place like that, back then. Didn't even know that about himself. 

The sidewalks are still busy, even at this hour. The city air is alive with beats leaking out of doorways and car windows. They stop at a place Steve knows that's selling empanadas to go, even at this late hour, and the bored dude behind the counter looks so pleased to have someone to serve that Bucky grills him on the three available fillings, ends up learning far more than he ever meant to about green olives and carmenere grapes, and walks out with a free cookie filled with caramel that he slips into Steve's pocket the moment they're out on the street. On the subway, there's a busker playing swing tunes on a trumpet and the two of them lean into each other easily standing against the doors.

"Okay?" Steve asks in the foyer that leads to their little studio rental. 

Bucky fends off that feeling of walking on a wire in a feat of balance that's going to fail any second.

"Yeah," he says, and lets Steve take his hand while they wait for the elevator. 

The bedroom's stuffy from afternoon sun, so they throw the windows open, letting in the traffic noise. In the low light from the lamp, Bucky hooks his phone up to the cheap little speakers on the shelf until the room fills with beats, and leans back against the wall.

"Suits you here," Steve observes lightly. Bucky just hums noncommittally and lets his eyes fall closed.

After a while, Steve's steps head towards the bathroom. "Hey Buck."

Unbelievably, the shower head in the tiny apartment is set over a bath.

"You always said you wanted one." He glances up meaningfully then leans over and decisively twists on the hot tap. "Go on."

Though Bucky's starting to fade into exhaustion, that just makes it feel hazy good when he sinks into the hot water with a groan of pleasure. Steve's just a couple of steps away, leaning against the sink and watching like it's the best show of the whole night. He's still wearing that intense focus he gets when he's all loaded up with the energy of a scene, and needs another person to release the charge into.

"Wait a second."

While Steve's gone, he takes the tie out of his hair and rests his neck against the cool rim of the tub, bends his legs to prop his feet flat against the opposite end. It's cramped, barely longer than it is wide, and the motor of the wall fan sounds like it's struggling, but to say it's a dream come true is no exaggeration. One Christmas, when he still had eight or nine years left to run and couldn't see any way he was going to make it, he made a list of things he was hanging on for, and spent the night falling asleep to each of them, one night at a time, for the whole under-heated month of January. This was one of them: the absolute decadence of lying in a tub of hot water. 

Steve comes back with two of those stemless wine glasses, and a half-sized bottle of bourbon he must have picked up when they came through the airport, and Bucky's head is too fuzzy to question any of it. The drink leaves him warm on the inside, equalising with the water outside and tugging loose the deep, resistant muscles that the heat hadn't already done its work on.

Then Steve curls one finger into the damp length of Bucky's hair and says, "Let me take care of that for you?", and that's how decadence turns into something he'd never even thought to fantasise about. 

Bucky tips his head back at Steve's urging, first for the syrupy warmth of water and then the coddling pleasure of Steve's strong fingers massaging suds into his hair. He thought he was relaxed already, but another layer of muscles he didn't even know he had start to drop their grip and go lax. The last troubles leach out of him, drip by drip. By the time the conditioner goes in, his pulse has turned so slow it's hard to believe he's still conscious. Eventually, Steve gives up the pretence and just takes advantage of the slipperiness to wind locks of hair around his fingers and let them lazily curl away. Bucky breathes out and lets his thoughts unspool freely, imagining how long they could stay here if he dug his heels in and refused to get back on that plane.

"I'm not going to wait for the meeting tomorrow," Steve says in a voice with some weight to it. "Don't need to. It felt good tonight. I can make it work, one way or another. Lean back for me."   
He dips his empty wine glass back in the water and pours it over Bucky's hairline, drenching his scalp in warmth. "So the only question is, what do you want?"

Bucky flails around for words. He's so tired, he feels unravelled, with the thoughts and feelings he keeps tightly controlled floating close to the surface of himself. 

"But your clients. Your business." The words he needs for this delicate conversation are slipping through his fingers like clouds, and his protests are starting to sound feeble. "You're got a whole world back home. You can't give all that up."

There's a pause that makes his heart sink.

"I think I already did," Steve says, turning hushed and feeling his way with care. "In my heart. When I looked up this place and asked T'Challa to put me in touch, I'd already decided. So yeah. I mean it. I'm just waiting for you to tell me whether you want the same thing."

"Steve."

He slides down in the water, hunching instinctively towards the far side of the tub, as if that could gain him some distance from the offer that's too huge for him to deal with. 

"Hey, come on." Steve, goes down on his knees beside the tub, and hooks his arm over Bucky's shoulder, pulling him close.

The heat and the drink and the tender care have melted all his defences away. He can't help it. He goes pliant in Steve's grasp and leans into his shoulder, hair bleeding warm water into his shirt while Steve's fingers stroke lightly up and down his arm. Despite every ugly thing that Bucky knows, right here and now, it's impossible to imagine there's anything in the world that could threaten them. Where's the goddamn animal wariness that kept him alive all those years?

"Think about it, Buck. You think you could move here?"

It feels like a trick, as if Steve has sprung this on him out of nowhere, but it's the same thing Steve's been saying all along. He tries to remember all the good reasons it can't work. But against his forehead is the pulse in Steve's neck, steady as ever.

"You're really asking?" Steve makes an impatient noise. "God, you're too much."

He turns to nose gently against Bucky's temple. "Was aiming for just enough for you to handle." There's an uncertain note that isn't usually there. "Say yes. Please. I'm tired of thinking about what I'd do if I didn’t have you. Trying not to think about it. I'm tired." 

For a moment, Bucky's chest is too tight to speak. Then the decision's made and the claws of self-denial loose their grip on him.

"Oh honey," he says on a sigh. "I'm going where you're going. If you really want to live here, then this is where I want to be too. That's a promise." 

It's still for a few moments. Then Steve turns slowly and plants a kiss on Bucky's ear. "You'll love it. There's so much I wanna show you." He sounds bursting with happiness now, goofy as ever. "I don't even know where to start." 

Bucky pushes back from him.

"Here's where we start, tiger. You get up off that hard floor before you wreck your knees. Then we get some sleep, and maybe after that we'll see about the city."

He pulls the plug and wobbles a bit unsteadily as he stands on limbs that feel further than they should from his torso. One moment, Steve's helping him out of the bath, and they're standing right up close, Steve's gaze intent on his face, and the promise of all his rock-solid strength just inches away. The next moment, Bucky's arms are wrapped around his neck, reeling him in tight and wracked with the intensity of being half of a whole again, after all those weeks and weeks of fighting shadow monsters on his own. 

"Oh honey." Steve sounds distraught as he accommodates the unfamiliar gesture immediately, sliding his hand up Bucky's back to cradle the back of his head. He's kissing Bucky's wet hair everywhere he can reach. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I let you down for a bit, but I've got you now, I swear. I've got you."

Christ, he's steady as a rock, and Bucky spent so many years without anyone to lean on. He turns his face into Steve's neck and lets himself cling for as long as he needs to.

His arms loosen their grip of their own accord, giving way to fatigue. Still half-drunk with steam and bourbon, he leans back just enough to notice how sexy all that denim and cotton feels against his freshly scrubbed skin. The shiver that runs through him is a new kind of mood, and he knows Steve senses it. 

"Come to bed," Steve murmurs, and then he's stripping as he goes, pulling the blinds down in between. 

Bucky pulls the covers back, and then they're lying in bed, facing each other, fingers given over to curious, skimming caresses with all the time in the world. Relief is like a stupefying new drug in his system. His muscles are as limp as wrung-out cloths, and Steve's touching him just right, the pads of his fingers curving over Bucky's chest, just a little scrape of nails tips down his flank as Bucky shifts his arm to make room. 

He feels so good everywhere, like the soft bed is a cloud of pleasure with him on it, and wrapped in it, all the hard emotion of the day faded into fuzziness. Steve's leaning over him to kiss a soft, meandering path along his jaw, down into the crook of his neck, his beard tickling lightly. Bucky's skin feels helplessly sensitive, blood and nerves roused by the heat, sitting right up under the surface, eager to feel anything Steve cares to give him. When he kisses delicately over Bucky's chest, every soft flicker of touch between them shocks him with arousal. It's as if the hot water dissolved off a layer of calluses, exposing brand new layers of skin. His nipple is tingling with pleasure even before Steve catches it between his lips and works it, then opens his wet mouth to lavish it with the hot swipe of his tongue, and all of a sudden he's making god-knows-what noises, aching with need – it's been days since he came, and Steve's right here, his hand running firm and strong down Bucky's side, squeezing the curve of his ass, kissing his throat now, treating him good.

"Steve," he groans just to have the name in his mouth. "Steve, please."

Steve turns his face into Bucky's chest and lets out a groan of his own, then carpets his ribs with fierce kisses. "God, I want to take you to pieces."

"Do it," Bucky begs him when those kisses dip below his navel, "Anything you want. Do it."

Then the head of his dick is enveloped in the lush heat of Steve's mouth. He sucks lightly at first, cinching his lips through a few slow strokes. After that, he pulls back and takes his time, running the coarse flat of his tongue up the crown, working the point of it into Bucky's slit until Bucky's seeing stars. But as hard as it works him up, Steve's hungry brand of fellatio, his body's too worn out to come this way.

"Need your hand, honey. Can you give me that?"

Fuelled with an explicit request, Steve's motivation goes from hot to boiling. A few blinks and he's got slick fingers wrapped around Bucky's dick, feeling his way towards the rhythm Bucky needs. 

"Wait up, wait. I wanna get my hands on you too."

There's a shuddery breath of agreement against his cheek, then Steve's squeezing lube in his palm, and after that everything whites out except the deep sounds of Steve's pleasure that build and grow ragged until he hauls himself over Bucky's body and thrusts himself through the last few strokes he needs to come. Bucky groans as the heat of it slicks his belly, and he splays his free hand over the base of Steve's throat where he can feel the sweat and the bristle and the hard kick of his pulse.

He lets Steve press clumsy kisses to his cheek, his lips, before he makes a noise of protest. That snaps Steve's attention back to him quick as a bullet, and he settles along Bucky's side, propped up on his bent elbow, and trails his fingers through the mess on Bucky's belly before he wraps them back in place, dragging off a couple of slow strokes before he breathes out _That's it,_ and hits the pace Bucky needs. There's other ways Bucky can come, but this is the way that hits him right between the eyes with pleasure, every single time. Steve's big hand, tight, slick, constant, just the right side of too rough. He's so far out of his head now, past exhaustion, so raw it all feels like something Steve's doing to him for the first time, and he's curling his hips up into Steve's grasp now, need taking over his nerves. Even with his eyes fallen closed, he knows Steve's gaze will be glued to his face, knows how bad Steve loves to watch him come undone. 

"Buck," Steve whispers, ragged, and ramps up the pace a fraction, and then orgasm hits him so hard it's like being turned inside out.

He doesn't remember the clean-up, or the lights going off. It's like he dives into a deep pool of beautiful numbness and doesn't come up again. 

**

Sometime in the night, he comes up briefly from his dreams, just enough to recall where he is. The traffic noise has faded away. He can feel Steve's head tipped against his shoulder, so he eases his arm up and out to make a space that Steve immediately rolls into, pillowing his head on Bucky's chest and slumping straight back to sleep. The warm, beloved weight of him settles. He breathes peacefully, right over Bucky's heart. Christ, he's missed this. Holding Steve in his arms without regret, like something to be cherished. 

He falls asleep to that thought and wakes again in the first grey light of morning, feeling restless. Curiosity pulls on him like a string as he dresses and slips on his jacket and takes the spare set of keys off their hook to get down to ground level. The streets are already alive with joggers and shift workers and dog walkers. It's a feeling so new it's raw, the anticipation of turning each corner completely without fear. Every street like a new page that's his to write on. Theirs to write on. He's only gone a few blocks when he wishes he'd brought Steve with him, to point out landmarks or habits or whatever the fuck is so special about this city it's drawn him back here. Maybe it's dumb to be so confident, in a big city where he should probably have his guard up just a little. But he can't help it. There's something about this place. It feels like its been waiting for him. 

When he gets back, Steve is dressed and sitting at the little kitchen table with the keys in front of him. He's calmly sketching something in the review book, not looking worried at all. 

"You ready to show me New York breakfast?" Bucky asks.

"Think you're up to it?"

"Just try me." 

Bucky's grin's so wide it hurts his face. Over breakfast. He can't help it. Everything feels so magical this morning, he's half tempted to channel it onto a physical plane and pull Steve back into bed. 

But Steve is pocketing the keys and holding the door open behind him. 

"Hey." Bucky stops him on the first step and waits for him to turn, so Bucky can put a hand on his shoulder and ground himself. Steve's looking up at him calmly, like he's happy to wait and enjoy the view a little. Bucky squeezes his shoulder and breathes. "I love you. Even when you're not turning your whole life upside down for me, I do. And I want to live here with you," he chews the inside of his lip a little. "I want to make sure you know."

Steve looks like he's trying to fight off the goofiest of his smiles "Yeah, I know. But it's still good to hear."

God knows, he should get to hear it a lot more that he does. He deserves that. 

Bucky leans down to kiss him, delicately, on the corner of his mouth where it's intimate without asking for anything more. When he pulls back, their eyes lock. "I love you. And I think you could be stuck with that forever."

Steve gives in to that smile, and spends a few more moments looking. Then he goes loping down the stairs, still grinning. 

"You might think you do. But you haven't met the corned beef hash at Tina's yet. Come on."

**

They fly back late on Monday, and the moment they leave the ground, Bucky's peace of mind starts to disintegrate again. That first night, the nightmares come back and don't stop coming. Bucky wakes up moaning, a raw, animal sound, face mashed into Steve's shoulder. 

"I keep losing you," he manages to croak, but the rest of it he can't put in words, the utter devastation of finding himself back inside with another decade on the horizon, and Steve snuffed out from the world completely, reduced to a memory, a shadowy imprint in Bucky's head, getting blurrier every day.

First thing on Tuesday, he tells Bruce he's moving away. 

"I gotta ask why," Bruce replies, mostly concealing his hurt. "All the reports I heard were good ones."

"New start," Bucky tells him, hoping it's clear it's a bit more than that. "Sorry to push off so soon. I know you stuck your neck out for me."

Bruce waves it away. "Sure, I had to raise my voice a little to get you through the door. But the work you've put in since then hasn't done my reputation any harm. And I don't need you to tell me I was right all along. Doesn't need to be said."

"Won't say it then," Bucky grins, relieved, and turns to go.

"Hang on. Steve's going too? Right?"

It's bizarre to think of that not being a certainty. "Seems like I can't shake him loose."

"Tell him to come see me when he knows what he wants to do with the property. Could be a good time to sell."

There's a training session on when Bucky gets back to his desk, leaving the cubicles around him empty, and once he's sent the email to Lee-Anne, he has nothing left to lose. So he calls the charities regulator again, thinking about the breezy tone Michael had used, like the outcome was a foregone conclusion and his job was simply to get all parties to that conclusion as efficiently as possible, remembering all the little turns of phrase he's heard in meetings and through open office doors. _I'm acting on behalf of_ sounds as strange in his head. _My client … wholly inadvertent non-compliance … in good faith._ But it smooths the way, and in less than five minutes he's got an email address to send the updated paperwork to. 

It doesn't actually seem real until he tells Becca. Once she's got past the surprise, she asks practical things, like does he need her to store anything or collect his mail. And can she book Lily in to stay around her sixteenth birthday when she's got dreams the size of Broadway and an attitude to match. He calls his mom last. There's a long silence that he can't read at all. 

Then she says on a sigh, "Good. I know it'll be good for you. I'm happy you're sticking together."

He can feel himself scowling at that. She makes it sound like he'd been having second thoughts about Steve, when Steve has been his number one priority the whole the time. "We're sticking together, Ma. You can count on it." 

It seems like Tony is the one who takes it the hardest, turning sulky for a whole day after Steve tells him, and then over-compensating by putting on a big farewell on Saturday, which coincidentally also gives him a chance to promote the hell out of it and pull in an extra crowd. A video appears on the website, complete with that notorious social media shot of Steve, and phone cam recordings of some of his masterclasses. There's a short clip from that first one, where they met. Bucky watches himself from side-on, shirtless, with his old prison ink down his left arm. Even from the doorway Tony had been standing in, it's obvious he's as tense as a cornered cat, a breath away from lashing out. But what he hadn't seen at the time was Steve's face, those worry lines on his forehead deepening as he felt the manifestations of distress under his hands, the way his attention snagged wholly on Bucky for those few moments, the audience forgotten as his instincts tugged helplessly in the direction where he was needed. 

Bucky doesn't think he's stupid. But he sure spent a lot of time hung up on the menacing shape of Steve, and took way too long to notice all that indefatigable service instinct that runs in his veins, obvious to anyone with the patience to look for the unexpected.

As Steve starts to pack books and paintings into boxes, Bucky watches him for signs of regret, and doesn't see any.

**

He spends Friday arranging pick-ups for the bondage equipment that's up for sale, while Steve does one last masterclass in the afternoon.

A few of the smaller items are going to friends from the club. The adjustable rack got snapped up pretty quickly on Ebay for more than half what Steve says he paid for it; he spends twenty minutes helping a trim woman in activewear load it into her Jeep Cherokee. The bids on the spanking bench aren't quite as generous, and he's not inclined to accept any of them. He kind of wants to see the look on Steve's face when he comes home to find it's the one thing Bucky's kept back.

It's early evening by the time Val's friend arrives, full of apologies, with the trailer that turned out to be a lot harder to borrow than he expected, and it's dark by the time the big cupboard from the office is loaded up and removed. The bareness of the office without it stops him in his tracks. Almost everything connected with Steve's work is gone now, or packed into boxes. And something else has gone, too – an air of danger, of taboo, perhaps, the residual energy of the many rituals that have been performed in this place. Suddenly it's just an empty room.

He moves the spanking bench and the boxes out into the main room and gives the office a good sweep and soaps down the walls, but that doesn't quite dispel the air of sadness. So he digs out the wood polish Steve has left over from when he put the floorboards in, and gets down on his knees to touch it up, corner to corner. 

It's satisfying work, useful work, and he gets so engaged in it that the ring of his phone hits him with a jolt.

As he scrambles to his feet and skids across the room to get it, he realises two things. It's gotten late. And Steve should have been home from his masterclass hours ago.

"Yeah?"

It's Natasha. "Everything all right?"

"Depends. What's up?" There's a puzzled silence. The tightness in his heart starts to spread through his chest. "Nat?"

"Where are you? Not in the front bar of Frank's obviously."

Shit. The contact she'd so reluctantly set up a meeting with. The axis of his world had shifted so completely, putting New York at the center of his geography, that he'd forgotten all about the meeting, and about the pistol he'd so desperately wanted to buy.

"I didn't – I'm sorry, Nat. Slipped my mind."

"Really? You just—" He has to wait while a far-off voice interrupts. "I'm on in two minutes, gotta go. But I'm calling you after and you're going to talk. Nate said there was a guy asking about you when he was taking out the trash this afternoon." 

"What guy?" Bucky chokes out, lungs suddenly struggling. 

"Asked for you by name. And whatever way he asked, Nate was still shaken up about it four hours later."

The website. That fucking video with him in it. Bucky can feel the blood draining out of his face. Fuck, he's been polishing floorboards while the jaws of death have been closing on his life. 

"Gotta go. Pick up when I call," she says, and the line goes dead before he can get a word out. 

But his horrified mind puts it together anyway. There's no way Steve waltzed in and out of his masterclass without stopping to check on a barman who was obviously spooked. There's no way he didn't find out exactly what Natasha's just told him. And, armed with that knowledge, what the fuck else is he going to do other than hang round the club to make sure his friends are safe? Steve's face is an open fucking book. Anyone else comes looking for Bucky, Steve's going to challenge them, and in that challenge it's going to be clear as fucking day what they are to each other. 

He grabs his knives, and slams the door behind himself, and then he's sprinting down the street towards the nearest road he can hope to flag down a cab on. He calls as he runs, twice, but Steve doesn't pick up. Fucking hell. If Natasha's on stage, the bar's empty, and the street outside too. Steve's on his home turf and, despite every ugly fact Bucky has tried to ram through his skull, he has no idea what he's up against. 

In the cab, his fingers dig into the armrest like he wants to crush it. He tries to get his head clear the way he used to be able to when it was only his own body in danger. Every moment was a choice: the choice where he lived, or the choice where he died. Find Steve, he tells himself. Keep Steve safe. And somehow keep everyone in the club safe, too. Fuck, he could have had a gun in his hand if he hadn't let himself get blinded by optimism again. 

Two streets away they hit traffic. "Thirty." Bucky barks at the driver and opens the door. Ring it up. You got ten seconds or I run."

He does it in eight. Bucky's out the door and running, dodging through the lanes of the bus station, powering up the hill as fast as his legs can push him. 

The club door is standing open, unguarded. Inside, Ivan's slumped against the wall with Nate pressing down dish towels over his bleeding shoulder wound.

"Ambulance?" Bucky demands, and Ivan makes a face like it's the last thing he wants. "Call a fucking ambulance. Where's Steve?"

Nate glances over his shoulder, as if surprised not to see anyone standing there.

"Where's the guy who did this?"

He follows Nate's gaze back out on the street. When he gets out there, it's still empty, the windows of the auto repairers and low-rent offices all dark. Grabbing a stray wine bottle from beside the skip, he heads away from the bus station, thinking Christ it could be over already. He only has to be a minute too late, a second too late, and he's lost – There's a grunt up ahead, coming from the service lane for the tile showroom that's been closed since the 1980s. One cut-off syllable of impact, and he's riding a burst of speed powered by sheer desperation.

It happens as matter-of-factly as any of the wrong turns his life took before now. 

As he rounds the corner, it takes two steps for the shadows to resolve themselves in the distant light from the street, Steve's height and golden hair marking him out. In the next step, he's clocked that there's two of them and they still can't quite overpower him. Steve's keeping one shadowy assailant at bay with his right fist, the other with a warning kick to the leg, but two-on-one he can't incapacitate them, can only fend them off. There's the flash of a blade in the gloom, but instead of striking, the man wielding it ducks out of range and steps further into Steve's peripheral vision, like it's a game he doesn't want to conclude prematurely. 

From the darkness against the half-collapsed showroom wall, a bald, broad-shouldered figure steps forward. The light catches Rattler's profile for an instant, just long enough to highlight his intent expression, like he's just walked up to a delicious meal and doesn't know whether to start with the gravy potatoes or the steak. Too focused on the kill to hear Bucky's footsteps, his right hand disappears on a trajectory that's going to lead towards the weapon tucked against the small of his back. 

Bucky flings the bottle. It spins end over end until it strikes the back of Rattler's head and veers off into darkness. Bucky doesn't give him time to blink. His body moves on autopilot, as choreographed as a wind-up toy, pulling the familiar steps out of his past. It's two movements as he skids to a halt, hand already in his pocket. Knife comes out, thumb swipes the blade release while the arm comes across his body then curves to swing backhand across Rattler's throat. Metal digs through the resistance of flesh. The bottle hits a wall and shatters in the distance. Just as Rattler raises the gun, Bucky switches angle to bring the slicing blade down across his fingers and he fumbles it, grabs, misses and sends it flying away. Still in motion, Bucky's left hand is already drawing the fixed blade from his belt as he steps towards Steve's attackers. He feints with his right and swings up with his left and puts the 6-inch blade right through the hand of the assailant with the knife, who growls when it goes in, showing a glint of gold tooth as he his own weapon clatters free, and lets out a snarl when Bucky rips it out again. 

A fist slams into him from behind and he pivots, bringing his right hand up to nick the edge of Rattler's jaw with the blade and make him draw back. With two knives holding him at bay, Bucky barely has a moment to think before there's movement behind him. He edges around. With gold tooth's weapon hand injured, Steve is pummelling him with everything he has; he's hazy, he's staggering. Rattler dodges forward and Bucky swings to keep him back. 

The second of Rattler's buddies – a slighter build, maybe young – suddenly goes into motion. He's fleeing. No, he's bending. He's scooping up the dropped gun and pointing it at Bucky's head, and the black menace of it in the dark stops Bucky's heart. 

"Do it," Rattler growls. 

The young man's face tightens as he pulls the trigger, but in the same second Steve's big arm swings out and catches him in the side of the face. He stumbles as the shot rings out and Bucky freezes for a moment, waiting for the pain that doesn't come. Beside him, Rattler takes one step back, two steps, hits the wall and sags against it. 

For a long moment, Bucky can't draw breath. Steve fells the gunman with two more merciless blows and the gun goes tumbling again. Switching both knives to one hand, Bucky grabs it and trains it immediately on Rattler, who's moving sluggishly. With the gun's muzzle against his forehead, Bucky touches Rattler's jacket. It's slick with blood, fuck that's a lot of blood. Bucky's distantly aware of the guy with the gold tooth grabbinh his knife off the ground and making a break for it, dragging his groggy buddy with him. Rattler gives one last shudder, and after that he doesn't move at all.

When he looks up, it's just him and Steve in the alley, and a dead man under his hand.

And just like always, the terrible mission focus slides off him as easy as a coat once the danger has passed, and in its place is only sickness. Every cell in his body feels dirty. He can't even find a part of him that's glad to be alive. 

"Let them go," he husks out when Steve moves as if to give chase. "For god's sake, it's over."

And then Steve is looking at him hard, watching as he struggles to his feet and shoves the killing weapons into his pockets and belt. He's glad of the darkness, doesn't want to know what Steve sees.

"I can't stay here anymore," he says numbly after a while. "It's like I said. I have to go."

Bucky stands there, fingers sticky with blood, and feels useless. He can't look at Steve. Even though he's standing straight and healthy, Bucky wants to run his hands over his body and grab all the physical reassurance he can. But he can't touch Steve like this. Maybe can't touch Steve ever, now that Steve's seen what he can do, what he had to teach himself how to do. A fucking alley on a Thursday night, of all the places for it to come to an end. He shoves his hands up under the front of his shirt to wipe them clean.

But Steve leans in, and kisses him gently on the corner of the mouth, where it's intimate without asking for anything more. "I know, Buck. I know."

He finds out that night that Steve can do a lot of things he never expected. Pick the padlocks on the gate to a factory yard. Break into a delivery van. Hotwire a delivery van. Wrap a body in the sodden carpet roll from the other side of the warehouse. And calmly help Bucky dig it right into the middle of the skip outside the smokehouse that gets emptied twice a week.

At home, they fall onto the sofa, hair still wet from the shower, and lean into each other silently, too keyed up to sleep until the sun comes up. 

**

This time when Bucky wakes up, he wakes into the nightmare instead of out of it.

He's on the sofa, he can tell from the texture of the leather arm under his cheek. Something weighty is over his torso – probably Steve's jacket – and his feet are tangled up in a blanket. His nerves are calm from very deep sleep, until the distant sense of wrongness starts to seep back in. 

Moments from last night come back to him, broken up in freeze-frames, as if his mind were sparing him the impact of the whole. It's enough to tell him that he practically killed a man. He checks the memory looking for an escape. Maybe it's a dream. Maybe he's mixing up old memories with new ones. But he remembers the awful threat of three assailants moving half-seen in the dark alleyway, and the resistance in his fingers and wrist as his knife connected with Rattler's flesh. 

His life has taken another one of those helpless turns. Another future has been wrenched away from him. He knows better than to rage about it. He lets the anger wash over him, and pushes the grief aside. The first step is to survey what's left of his life, and find out what he's lost and what he gets to hold onto. 

When he sits up, slowly, he finds that Steve is behind him, leaning against the sill of an open window. Bucky's plants that normally sit there have been moved. He's hunched in on himself, arms folded, as if he might be cradling an injury, and his face is bleak when he looks up. He makes no move to cross the careful distance between them. 

There'll be plenty of heartache if this is the end for them, he thinks distantly. No point in giving way to it before he knows he has to. He's doubted Steve before, and been wrong, and told himself to have more faith next time. But this is a hell of a next time. 

"You're all in one piece." Bucky's voice scrapes in his throat, and he clears it. "Nothing bleeding?"

Steve shakes his head slowly, attention locked on Bucky now like he's wrestling with what to say and coming up blank. The silence quenches some little spark of hope. Because there's no way he didn't see what Bucky did. There's no way he could think it was anything other than what it was. And he's full of pure beliefs, Steve, no matter how hard life has tried to sully them. He doesn't concede to pragmatism, and can't quite grasp why Bucky does, either. The distance between them is a gulf today. Bucky can still feel the phantom slick of blood between his fingers. 

Some tension goes out of Steve's body, like he's letting go. There's sunshine catching his shoulder and neck, fringing half of him in warm light.

"I get it," Steve says at last, sounding equally wrecked. His folded arms tighten again. "Everything you were saying. I get it now." 

He's ill-at-ease in a way that's new, like he's literally holding himself together, and it makes Bucky wonder if this is how he looked when he had Peggy Carter ripped away from him halfway through a night shift. But there's always been fire in the way he talks about that incident, railing against inflexible rules and bureaucratic incompetence. Today, it's as if he's had a tidal wave of bad luck crash over him, and is numbly reconciling himself to a new worldview that recognises how fragile his life is, and how the forces that threaten it are utterly beyond his power. 

"I'm sorry, honey. I wish you didn't have to."

Something about that endearment, that falls so easily from his tongue these days, unlocks the dreadful tension within himself. Every beautiful moment they've built together, nothing can touch that, not even last night. His heart is full to brimming, all of a sudden. He's taking it with him into his future, whether that future has Steve by his side or not. 

"It was only one of them," Steve says, careful and hesitant and not like himself at all. "Gave Ivan a bit of trouble while I was in checking on Nat." His gaze drifts away. "He had a knife out by the time I came back, but I could have handled that. I've got the training. The funny way he looked at me as he backed out into the street, I thought he must have known, somehow. That I used to be a cop." 

As Bucky's skin prickles at the memory of how close he came to losing everything, and remembers what an immense privilege it is even to have this one final day, Steve goes on.

"Ivan got to him first – he's okay, by the way. They found a doctor to put some stitches in him." His fists bunch up, arms still curled around himself. "I followed him down the alleyway. The other guy was right behind me. No way that was a coincidence."

It's true, none of them would have gone one-on-one against a man built like Steve. It was a hit, not a fight. Nothing fair about it. 

Steve looks shaken when me meets Bucky's gaze again. "I didn't even see the third one until you took him down. He would've—"

Steve's jaw clenches tight, cutting off the sentence. 

"Yeah," Bucky breathes. "But he didn't."

He watches Steve force himself to relax, hands returning to the sill, head tipping back against the window pane. Bucky's attention tracks helplessly down the straight lines of his body, to the shallow cardboard box at his feet that has all Bucky's plants fitted snugly into the base. An unbearable pulse of hope starts up behind Bucky's ribs.

He steels himself and says, "I've gotta get on that bus tonight."

Something painful chases over Steve's brow, something Bucky knows he's not going to like. He makes himself breathe, wondering if what's left of their marriage can be measured in breaths now and, if it can, how many does he have left? 

"Yeah, about that," Steve says eventually, and straightens up to look Bucky in the eye. "It makes a whole lot of sense to stay on a bit. Just until Tony's party on Saturday. Leave afterwards, nice and casual, like we always planned."

He must mistake Bucky's silence for something critical, because he goes on, "Couple of friends of Val's are going to work the door. Safe enough. Just one last night. And then on Sunday, we hit the road."

"Idiot." For a little while, that one strangled word is all Bucky can manage. "You come this close to letting them wipe you out, and now you want to give them one more chance to finish it? You got a new kink for near-death experiences or something?"

It's like he's on a roller coaster of reactions, swooping from despair right into righteous fury, like something big has got to get out of him and will take any current of emotion it can follow.

"Come on, Buck. We go door to door in a cab. I'll leave the bike at home. I won't even argue about the knives this time."

And just like that, the track vanishes from under him and his spirits go into freefall. It's the one lie he'd allowed to stand between them. He's shielded Steve from seeing the killer in him. And maybe he'd started to shield himself, too. Started to let himself believe the James Barnes who sorted the emails and managed the laundry run was not quite connected to the James Barnes who broke a man's skull and nearly took his life. But Steve has seen him now, with knives in his hands, and he's seen himself. He draws his knees up and hunches over them.

"Buck?"

But Bucky can't hope to articulate the shame in himself. It's quiet for a long time. Then, at the sound of tearing tape, he glances over. Steve's standing up from a packed box, cuffs in hand. He strips his shirt off one-handed as he approaches, and Bucky's so distracted by the dark splodges of bruising over his lower ribs and sides that he doesn't register what's happening until Steve is perched on the sofa by his hip. He casually drops the key on its elastic into Bucky's lap, folds his hands behind himself, and cuffs his own wrists. 

Bucky makes an inarticulate noise of objection. Steve doesn't move. Just sits with his head bent, kneeling on the very edge of the sofa cushion and waiting.

Almost despite himself, Bucky reaches out to touch one of the worst patches, just to the right of Steve's navel, purple bleeding into red. The damaged flesh is hot to touch. Steve doesn't flinch when he runs the pads of his fingers over it. He just breathes out slow, as if Bucky's touch had anaesthetic properties.

"You in pain?"

Steve shrugs. "That feels good."

Bucky can't stand to look up and find out whether the tenderness in his voice is in his face, too. So he shifts around to get his feet on to the floor and follows the wounds upwards, traces an uneven dark patch right over Steve's solar plexus that must have knocked the wind out of him, even if he'd manage to steel himself to meet it. Looking at the damage he's seeing now, he thinks Steve must have been holding himself up on sheer spit and fury by the time Bucky got there. He'd been in a far worse state than he'd seemed.

Bucky follows the bruises with the same whisper of a touch, where they're clustered under his ribs and then where they thin out above that. The last one, level with his heart, has a concentrated point of purple that looks like a knuckle, and that makes him sick, the reminder of someone laying hands on Steve solely to hurt him. He finds his fingers skimming undamaged flesh, skirting the contours of his muscles, touching for the sake of touching, just to remind himself that Steve's still alive in there, stubbornly resilient. 

He strokes up Steve's breastbone, skipping the leather thong with the ring on it, and rests his hand gently over Steve's throat, where the life beats in him. When he looks up at last, Steve's lips are parted and his eyes falling closed. 

"Are we taking this anywhere?" 

Steve makes a small, fluid movement, not even resolved enough to be a shrug. "That's up to you." His voice is deep and contented, a little slurred even. "What do you want?" 

Bucky wants to go on tracing the contours of Steve's body gently with the pad of his finger, over the crest of his pecs where the hair he usually waxes so vigilantly is starting to prickle under the touch. He wants to run the flat of his hand up the side of Steve's neck and knead at the muscle that knots up under stress. He wants to smooth away the faint traces of worry lines on Steve's forehead and dent the soft swell of his bottom lip with his thumb and think about how he'd kiss him, if he thought that was something he deserved to do. It's a long time before Steve shifts his knees slightly, and shadows of discomfort cross his brow.

"Your legs have gone to sleep. Were you even going to say something?"

"Doesn't matter," Steve tells him in that same slurry voice. "Don't stop."

Bucky frowns at that. He knows Steve's turn-ons, and this kind of slow-burn curiosity isn't one of them. Steve lets out a slow, deliberate exhale, and it hits him, this isn't about Steve at all. This is about Steve putting himself at Bucky's mercy, and demonstrating to them both what Bucky does with that power. He shivers, to think what his hands did yesterday, the same hands that are following the line of Steve's collar bones now, right to left and back again. 

"You oughtta have some damn sense of self preservation," It comes out in a whisper, with none of the reproach he aimed for. 

"I had enough of that. For a lot of years." He bites himself off, as if there was more. 

And Bucky knows what's in that silence. Knows how badly Steve needed someone to break his own rules with, someone he didn't have to be in control around, someone he never had to put on a character for. He chose Bucky to be that person, and he keeps on making that same choice, no matter how hard it's gotten. 

"All right," Bucky promises. "Settle down. I'm not going anywhere. Not without you anyway."

Steve sighs and leans into Bucky's touch, and it goes on like that until Bucky's descended back to where he started, going gently with the worst of the bruising over Steve's abdomen. The combination of repetition and easy intimacy has done its work on his nerves. He feels like himself again, and like that could be an okay person to be.

"You made your point now? Can I take these off you?"

Steve makes a noise that doesn't quite equate to yes, a message that Bucky knows him too well not to receive loud and clear. 

He lets himself have one last moment of wallowing in how he doesn't fucking deserve this, before he reaches to draw Steve into a kiss. It's so soft at first that Bucky's nerves tingle hungrily. He pushes up into it, seeking the giving heat of Steve's mouth, and Steve gives him everything he wants.

When they've had enough, Bucky takes the cuffs off and rubs the skin where there would have been chafing, if Steve had struggled for a moment of it. 

"How about I put coffee on?" Steve offers, standing up to stamp the feeling back into his feet. 

When Bucky thinks back to yesterday, it's like a life he read about in a magazine. 

"Out of milk."

"Give me a minute then." Steve picks up his jacket from where it had fallen onto the floor and has slipped his arms into it before he reads Bucky's expression. "What? It's just the gas station. Less than a hundred yards." 

Bucky wrestles with the warnings that are going off in his head, and can't manage to quiet them down.

"All right," Steve says decisively. "We go together."

When he holds out his hand, Bucky takes it.

**

Unbelievably, Steve's last night at the club on Saturday goes ahead uneventfully, even if Bucky runs an extra layer of security inside and spends the whole night grimly waiting for one last catastrophe to bring his life undone. 

"Everything to your satisfaction?"

He's surprised to recognise T'Challa's voice behind him, sometime after midnight. He's rarely seen here when the club's in operation, but in his black jeans and sleekly fitted black leather jacket, he could be mistaken for one of the wealthier clientele.

"The entry should be less direct," Bucky tells him, startled into giving voice to his thoughts. "Corridor along the wall here, one-way glass with another guard behind it. Then you could rest easy."

"I have the feeling that's no longer necessary."

His face reveals exactly what he permits it to, and nothing more. If anything, he's become more inscrutable since the time Bucky started working for him. But there's something in his tone that makes Bucky's head tilt into a wary question. 

"Thursday night was eventful. There was an assault not far from here. Nate called me in. The victim never came forward, but one of the perpetrators dropped a knife as he was fleeing the scene." Bucky's knives are all accounted for, and T'Challa's telling the story with evident satisfaction, so Bucky lets him go on. "The same knife was found at the site of a warehouse fire on Friday morning, complete with bloody fingerprints and ample DNA on he handle. Very unfortunate choice of target. A group of Russian businessmen were using that warehouse to store cell phones obtained by less than lawful means."

Bucky swallows hard and tries to keep a lid on his reaction. "If the attack happened here, didn't the cameras—"

"Equipment malfunction. Another unfortunate circumstance. The footage cuts out about an hour after opening."

Bucky stands there dumbly while it all washes over him, the reprieve for him and Steve, the deft removal of the threat to the club, and the fact T'Challa has sought out this opportunity to tell him. His mouth twists unhappily trying to find the right way to say thank you without acknowledging that T'Challa has orchestrated anything for which he needs to be thanked. 

T'Challa's face softens slightly. "Did you think I managed to run a fetish club in this neighbourhood for fifteen years without learning how to defend my borders?"

There's a fierce glint in the depths of his dark eyes, and Bucky is acutely aware of how much about T'Challa's past he doesn't know. A fleeting sense of kinship takes him by surprise. 

"If you ever need my help," Bucky tells him, meaning it sincerely. "You let me know."

He feels ill at ease with the crowd after that, so he buys a couple of drinks and takes them up to the storage space Steve and Natasha use for a dressing room. 

Natasha's leaning back on her chair, glossy boots crossed on the counter, testing her stingers for what looks to be a sizzling demonstration. When she holds them close together, a flash of blue runs between them. She glances at the vodka, lime and soda that he sets down for her.

"I heard about the fire yesterday."

"Mmm," she says absent-mindedly, zapping them again from a slightly increased distance. "Lot of very angry men stomping around in the ashes and saying very angry things in Russian. I wouldn't want to be the men they are saying those things about. Not if there were some draft witness statements from the State's Attorney's office in circulation, containing the address where those men can be found."

"Sounds like your friends are handy people to know."

A complicated expression passes over her face and he wishes he hadn't said that. 

"Come and see us," he adds quickly. "You've got clients in New York, right? Stay on a bit next time. Have a look around."

She looks like she's working up a wry way to decline, so he makes himself catch her eye in the mirror and say, "I'll be in a city full of strangers. Come on. Be nice to catch up with a friend."

She shoots him an intensely sceptical look, followed by a dark smile. "Maybe I will."

When he gets downstairs, it's packed to capacity. Since he's got no chance of getting a view of the main stage, he slips in behind the bar to give Nate a hand and listens to Steve's voice handing out steely commands and measured praise over the speakers. Every word is genuine – he knows Steve taps into his real self in every scene. But all the same, it will never not be a thrill to listen for the things that aren't there. The rawness, the vulnerability and the little spark of danger that are just for the two of them together. 

There's applause, there's milling fans, there's two hours of drinks after the doors close, but at last they're heading home.

It looks almost unrecognisable, with the folding screen that partitioned off the bedroom packed away, and everything except the sofa, the bed and the table packed into boxes. The sense of refuge that Steve had carefully built here has seeped out like warmth through an open window. The room no longer seems stamped with his personality.

But Bucky's the one who stops inside the door, pierced with melancholy, while Steve makes a bee-line for the bed, stripping as he goes, and flops exhausted into its embrace. It takes a minute or more before he rouses himself and twists back.

"Everything okay?"

Bucky feels his face shadow unhappily. "It was a big deal for me," he shrugs. "This place. After everything. You know."

There's a way Steve's developed lately of watching him the same way he might observe a finished sketch, or a well-executed work of shibari. Simple pleasure, unburdened by expectation. 

"It was a big deal for me too. Least I thought it was. Until I worked out what was missing."

Bucky shakes his head despairingly, but he's already moving towards the bed, stripping as he goes. 

**

It's like unloosening a great knot in him, leaving the city. 

He drives the afternoon shift, his limbs remembering the motions of brake pedal and indicator switch like familiar dance steps. The sun's behind them now. The windows are down and the music is up, and every mile shoves the shame and horror of his past further and further into history. 

They're in a hire car full of boxes, and Bucky will be looking for a rental apartment from the cheapest hotel rooms they can find along the road, while Steve calls his clients one by one and cancels two months of appointments. They have a suitcase full of the more portable bondage implements, and the number of a guy Bruce met at a conference who might have work that's somewhere between book-keeping and debt collection. For now, Steve's turning his face into the rushing wind, elbow propped on the window frame, eyes closed. For the first time in a long time, the road ahead looks more hopeful than the road behind, and Bucky can't remember the last time he felt like this, as if he could be on the brink of a future that’s his to shape.

It's overcast by the time they pull in for gas. But in the carpark out back there's a view through the wire fence over furrowed fields and wooded hills, so they drink coffee in paper cups out there and take their time. Little gusts of wind are flicking chip packets and lost paper napkins along the ground with the wildness of an approaching storm, and the air feels charged with possibility.

"First thing I'm gonna do when I get there," Bucky says, "is change my name."

"Yeah?" Steve asks. "Change it to what?"

Evidently this isn't a subject he's been turning over in his head for two days, like Bucky has, mulling over which state it's better to submit the paperwork in. 

"There's gotta be a lot of James Rogers out there. Seems like a name that blends in." 

Steve turns to him, soft with surprise. But then he says, with just a hint of teasing, "Shame we're not technically married right now."

It takes a moment to come back, the fact that Steve's ring is still on a chain around his neck. Bucky sets his cup on the hood and reaches into the collar of Steve's t-shirt to pull it out. Steve bends his neck so he can drag the clasp to the front and unfasten it

There's a fleeting moment of nerves once he has it in his hand.

"Steven Grant Rogers," he says. "You really want to hitch yourself to this total wreck of a human who's just made you leave your whole life behind?" 

Steve smiles indulgently. "You know I do." 

"Give me your hand then."

The ring slides on easy, right where it belongs. Steve catches his hand and holds it.

It's better than the registry office. There's no clerk standing in front of them with three more couples to take care of before lunch. When he kisses Steve, it's as slow as he wants, and his whole heart is in it. 

**  
end


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's not much space left in the tiny apartment, once it's all in place. The worn carpet is an institutional shade of blue-grey, the kitchen fittings cheap oak veneer, the only glimpse of greenery is what they brought in pots, but he's back in Brooklyn, and they're here together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the holiday treat you were looking for last time. Zero suffering. Maximum fluff. Happy holidays.

**Epilogue**

It takes them three weeks to find a place. Three weeks of racking up expenses for the hire car they end up living out of, shifting it from day to day to anywhere on the city fringe they can find a park, showering in gyms. Bucky glances at him balefully over each pizza dinner as a reminder that he's been writing Brooklyn off as a fantasy ever since the first time Steve suggested it.

But for his second session at the new club, Steve digs out that leather vest that barely does up, and struts in with a lot of gleaming, freshly waxed muscle on display, and by the end of the night he's landed his first two clients. One of them runs an app design company off of a massive load of family money and it turns out he'll gleefully pay a premium hourly rate for Steve to do as much as Bucky will let him. After that, it's only a few nights in a hotel before a contact of Will's comes through with an introduction to a rental agent who has a new one-bedroom come onto her books at just the right time.

They take the place as is, and spend the first day scrubbing caked-on grime from the kitchen and the cramped bathroom, before Steve goes back for the big furniture and the last of the boxes. 

There's not much space left in the tiny apartment, once it's all in place. The worn carpet is an institutional shade of blue-grey, the kitchen fittings cheap oak veneer, the only glimpse of greenery is what they brought in pots, but he's back in Brooklyn, and they're here together. 

Hammering the removable three-pinned hooks into the living room wall is even more satisfying than he expected. It feels like a claim of permanence to hang two of his smaller sketches behind the sofa, and when he steps back, they're perfectly even. 

A few feet away, Bucky is sorting through the first of the boxes, dropping cutlery and utensils into drawers. There's a pile of newspaper at his feet, and the bowls and plates are stacked on the counter awaiting placement. His work abruptly forgotten, Steve watches him spin a wooden spoon through his fingers and tuck it into the empty pickle jar on the counter top. It seems like he enjoys sorting through their things and putting them in an order that makes sense to him, and, honestly, Steve's heart is still giving a little pang of pleasure at the thought of both of them here together. That matters to him more than he would have thought, that he's moving into Bucky's place now, as much as Bucky moving into his. Both their names went on the lease. Steve would have said the old place was the same, but right now, observing how Bucky's happily shifting things around with more liberties than he ever took in Steve's kitchen, he can see how he was holding back before, and he's gladder than ever that they got this chance to start again, from scratch, together. 

"You wanna put some music on?" Bucky asks without turning.

Steve sits the laptop on the coffee table and hits a playlist with a bit more industrious grunt in it than Bucky's usual dance beats. 

"I said _music,_ " Bucky throws over his shoulder, but, all the same, it's obvious how his knees and spine loosen up a fraction, his heels pick up from the floor, one then the other, like the beat, any beat, pulled directly on his nerves. 

As much as the house is smaller, more of it is kitchen. There's an oven at last, and a full-size refrigerator that Bucky picked up second-hand yesterday while Steve was still on the road. Steve will be the first to admit he's never had anything to show off about in the kitchen, but when he thinks about Bucky coming home from work to a house that smells like roast chicken, or fresh bread, or pie, it's a challenge he's keen to get his fingers into. 

"What do you think about one of those bread making machines?" 

Becca wants to get them a housewarming present, and since they've got triple the storage space compared to his old makeshift kitchen, it's hard to say no. But Bucky makes a reluctant noise.

"Oh, you can put all the linseed and walnuts you want in it," Steve assures him. "Believe me, you can make a lot more than just the white stuff that's not fit for rats. What about some olives? Cheese and jalepenos. Whatever you want."

He gets the same noise, this time with an edge of considering, and Steve can't help his grin. 

It occurs to him he should ask Becca for a picture of the kids to hang on the wall as well, and he instantly checks that thought because he's so used to confining personal things to the bedroom. Then he remembers, there will never be clients here. When he builds up his client base, it will all be in someone else's premises. This is a place for him and Bucky and the friends they make. It doesn't have to be kept clean, and they don't have to hold anything back from what they do. 

He's moving before he knows it, towards where Bucky is wetting a cloth to wipe the bowls clean and put them up in the cupboard one by one. Hand settling on his waist, he leans in to kiss the back of Bucky's neck, among the soft strands of hair that have escaped from his elastic, then wraps his arms around Bucky from behind. But the response isn't what he expects. There's a pattern his muscle memory knows: a subtle jerk of heightened tension, then conscious control, then acquiescence, and since the first time he felt it, he's loved that feeling of Bucky deliberately letting him in. This time, it's different. Bucky leans back into him without hesitation, grasps Steve's forearm, going from loose to looser in a moment. 

"Hi," he says. "You telling me the bedroom needs a little more attention?" 

Steve can't help it. He tightens his grip and curls his face into Bucky's neck. 

"Mmm," Bucky goes on as if he'd answered. "Good point. How about we spend the whole afternoon in bed while we still can?"

He leans back a little more, lets Steve take his weight, and Steve tightens his grip, thinking not of all the times he could have lost Bucky, but of all the times he kept him, all the chances they both took on each other, when it was easy and when it cost them. Bucky's always solid in his arms, but today he feels weighty as an anchor, here to stay. That part of him that always seemed to beat with the roused pulse of an animal about to take flight, it's gone quiet. 

Steve lets him go when he shifts, but it's only to turn in Steve's arms and slide a hand around the back of this neck.

He tilts his head inquiringly as his voice goes honey deep. "You want me to ask real nice or something, Captain?"

Steve's throat goes tight all of a sudden, at the twinkle in his eyes and the easy, confident teasing, when he used to throw out tentative barbs and watch sidelong to see if Steve took them. His gaze drops to where the corner of Bucky's mouth twitches into a grin.

"That’s more like it," Bucky says, and leans in for a slow, savouring kiss that he pulls back from too early, solely to make Steve do what he does, which is slide his palms down to Bucky's ass and pull him in close. That produces an extremely interested noise as Bucky switches angle and kisses him properly, tightening his grip with his forearm behind Steve's neck so he can take everything he wants, right from the depths of Steve's mouth. And just like every time Bucky takes control like this, Steve's higher functions go up in smoke and all he can do is dig his fingers hungrily into Bucky's ass cheeks and try to keep up. Before long, Bucky's managed to wedge his free hand down between them, knuckles rubbing over Steve's crotch until there's a defined ridge of arousal for them to rub against.

"Come on," Bucky breaks off to say, biting one last kiss into his mouth. "Come and lie down so I can suck your brains out without bruising my knees."

It's a mood Steve can't get enough of, the two of them tumbling into bed at one in the afternoon, for no reason but each other. Not on the way to sleep, not a snatched moment before the next appointment, just pleasure, and lounging about in between. It's been months since they did it.

His shirt is barely off when Bucky's dragging down his track pants and briefs, giving him a second to step out of them before he's pushing Steve back onto the bed and crawling over him. It's early afternoon and Steve's senses are all sharp. His bare skin is prickling all over. Christ, his dick is throbbing with how bad he needs Bucky to touch him, and he can't look away from the soft pink of his parted lips, the glistening promise between them. For a few seconds Bucky does nothing but watch him hungrily, until, without breaking eye contact, he bends down to kiss low on Steve's belly, laying a soft bite on top of it, then at last he opens his mouth to run the hot flat of his tongue right up Steve's dick. His whole body spasms in response, and he gets hard so quick it leaves him dizzy. 

Bucky shoots him one last self-satisfied look and turns his face down to get to work. He's deeply into it today, mouthing his way around Steve's dick, letting out little grunts of satisfaction. 

"Some days you taste so good." He's laying hungry kisses around the base, darting his hot tongue down over Steve's balls, and leaving fleeting, not-nearly-enough strokes with the tip of his nose everywhere he passes. "I don't even know what it is." 

God, Steve will never not love the way Bucky sweet talks in bed. Doesn't even matter what he says. Just that the connection between them is important enough to reach out with his voice, when Steve still remembers the time he didn't even want to look Steve in the eye. The talk cuts off the moment Bucky gets his mouth full. He sucks shallowly, lavishing the head with his lips and tongue until there's a sticky mess of spit dripping everywhere, and all through it he darts up electric little glances while his cinched finger and thumb keep up a devastating tight rhythm around the base. He knows Steve's body too well now. All he needs is a consistent rhythm and the sounds of Bucky enjoying himself. 

"Come on, baby," he murmurs hoarsely, freeing his mouth for a moment. "Give it up for me." 

And, helplessly, Steve slumps back into the covers and does, and does, and does. 

Bucky looks pretty damn pleased with himself afterwards, sucking his bottom lip into his mouth just to drag Steve's gaze with it.

"I think I'm gonna like this place," Steve tells him, feeling pretty dreamy and probably sounding it too. 

Bucky flops on his back beside him, laughing delightedly. "Yeah, Steve. It's the house. The mildew in the bathroom corners and the – no, wait, the cheap linoleum kitchen floor. Really gets me wild."

When Steve shoves him gently with his elbow, it only makes him laugh harder. "The rust on the shower head – mmm."

The vibration of his laughter runs warmly into Steve's shoulder and arm. There's a link there, he's sure. Between Bucky feeling safe and Bucky laughing. He wants to claw his fingers into that sound and hold onto it. 

He's still laughing when Steve leans over him. 

"What about you, you little punk? You gonna get those clothes off and let me take care of you?"

Bucky's eyes flash defiantly and the curl of his mouth turns into a challenge. "That'd be right. I gotta do all the work around here, may as well do --"

"All right," Steve cuts him off gruffly and yanks the t-shirt up his body. If he doesn't help, he squirms the right way to make it easy for Steve to strip him down, and when he's naked, he leans up on his elbows to let Steve look his fill.

"Well?" he prompts in a richly entitled tone that makes Steve's palm itch for the paddle.

"Well," Steve repeats evenly, and rolls off the bed to tug open the nearest box. Bucky doesn't move an inch while he's rummaging around for the slick, and that puts fire in his belly all by itself. 

He squeezes the lube straight onto Bucky dick, just to hear him hiss through his teeth, then exhale slow when Steve wraps it in warm fingers. There's still plenty of give in it. He secretly loves that, working Bucky hard. He's suspected once or twice that Bucky's sensitive about it, that he needs work to get properly hard and a lot of firm pressure to come, but it's not exactly surprising after all the years when any pleasure he could steal had to be quick and furtive and, often as not, solo. Anyway, it's a huge turn-on for Steve, when Bucky asks for his hand, trusting Steve to know just how to get him there. 

"Love doing this for you," he says, watching the head of Bucky's cock darken in his grip as he stands it up straight and pumps nice and slow. "Gonna make you feel so good."

He glances up just in time to catch the overwhelmed expression on Bucky's face, a fleeting hint of entreaty, and then his eyes flutter closed. It's too much. They have all afternoon. Steve practically pounces on him, barely holding back his body weight as he brings their mouths together.

The hungry, stifled moan he gets just eggs him on, pinning one of Bucky's wrists into the sheets and pulling back to nip at his lips. It's not how they kiss when Bucky's running the show, sheer indulgence, coaxing and teasing and, on a good day, laughing. This is his dom instincts wanting to eat Bucky alive and make him like it. He forces himself to put the brakes on, lifts up a little, breathing hard. 

Bucky's eyes are hooded, dazed looking. He leans up enough to take Steve's lip between his teeth and drag the flesh a little.

"What's this slacking off? I gotta put you on a timer or something, do I?" 

This time Steve kisses him back into the pillow, hard, and grabs both his wrists to hold him down, and Bucky's breathing picks up, especially when Steve starts to graze down his throat. There's noises he makes to let Steve know he's okay, when it gets a bit rough, but that's another kind of work, and this is different. He's letting out these eager, surprised little _ah_ sounds as Steve opens his mouth and abrades his neck in a way that will probably be okay in time for his interview on Wednesday, and he's not resisting Steve's grip on him, not a bit. Steve makes himself pause, swapping the hunger for soft kisses, listening to make sure the pleasure he's hearing is Bucky's and not just his own. Then he shifts fully over Bucky and lowers himself at an angle where Bucky can grind up against him, working himself slick and hard into the curve of Steve's hipbone. There's a long, beautiful stretch of just that, Bucky grinding up hard against him, while Steve bites his jaw with gentle determination as those sighs slowly grade up into groans. 

"I need more, baby. I can't come this way." 

"I know," Steve murmurs into his skin.

He raises himself up and takes a moment to enjoy the view of Bucky's flushed face and pinked-up skin, eyes all hungry big. 

"You want my hand?" 

Bucky's chest is rising fast underneath him, his mouth all loose and practically quivering, but his gaze is level. 

"Please," he says, all soft and needy, and Steve's hand is moving before he gives it permission. It closes around Bucky's dick, taking a firm grip and stroking fast and hard, and – god – Bucky's the most beautiful sight he's ever seen, lips parted, eyes fluttering closed, and his brow all creased in agony that only Steve can release him from. He gasps when he comes, and Steve bends down to kiss him, as if he could drink the pleasure right out of Bucky's mouth.

Afterwards, he lies bonelessly and lets Steve drop more of those feathery kisses on him, before he pushes back for the first time since they started. 

"Go easy on the face, huh? I'm gonna need it on Wednesday." 

There's still laughter in his voice, deep and contented now. Steve loves him so many different ways, but this -- From the start, he knew he was getting all of Bucky's innate competence, and an integrity he could feel in his bones, and those eyes that made his heart skip. But Bucky like this, loose with laughter and trust, this is a sort of magic he never even dreamed of. 

Since not even Bucky had the foresight to prioritise sex supplies for the bedroom on day 1, he cleans up the mess with his t-shirt and settles himself over Bucky's chest. Bucky's still a bit spaced out, idly stroking Steve's back. This is more than simply Bucky shaping himself to Steve's sexual preferences, he's pretty sure. He'd put money on Bucky having had a bit of a submissive streak when he was young. Maybe not anything he would have put a label on at the time, perhaps just complacency, a tendency to lie back and let a keen partner run things in bed, drawing on that half-unconscious weaponised pout and bucketloads of physical beauty to get the kind of treatment he wanted without ever having to ask. That streak that could be a mile wide by now, if he hadn't been forced into an environment where he had to bury it deep beneath all those threatening, defensive layers that kept him alive, and turn himself into someone to be feared. He'll never know, but it makes his heart swell like a balloon to think that, inch by inch, he's helping Bucky reconnect with that side of himself.

"You ever think we could do that in front of a crowd?" Bucky asks out of nowhere.

Steve's sleepy musings abruptly turn focused, and he tries not to tense up. He slowly raises himself to look Bucky in the eye. 

"Is that something you want?" 

"Not if it makes you look like that." Bucky laughs again, and Steve can feel it right through his body this time. "I don't know. Maybe I just like to imagine it a bit. Doesn't have to be—" He strokes Steve's hair and pulls him back down where he was. "You got some fine inhibitions for a professional, you know that? Lucky I'm open-minded." 

Then Steve is laughing too, mostly just for sheer ridiculous joy, but, all the same, relieved. 

"You gonna be all right here if I hop in the shower for a bit?" Bucky asks a lot later, sitting up.

"I think I'll make it." 

Bucky looks at him critically when he stops in the doorway, still gloriously naked. 

"Your sketchbook's in that box there, B2. Keep yourself busy."

He's in there a long time, longer than the poor water flow accounts for. The shower shuts off after a while, but he doesn't come out. Instead, music starts up on his phone, a deep voice and a guitar, not the sort he dances to. Steve looks at box B2 and decides it sounds too much like hard work, and the subject he most wants to sketch is out of view anyhow. All the same, his foot starts to tap against the mattress of its own accord, after a while. The water switches on again, and shuts off.

He knocks on the bathroom door. "You want a sandwich, Buck? I'm gonna put some together." There's a little eager tug in his groin. "For after." 

Bucky takes a while to answer. "Any chicken left from last night?"

"I'll look into it." 

He pulls his track pants back on and takes his time fixing up the meagre ingredients in the fridge, hunting down a pan to boil up four eggs in. The shower goes on again. He mashes up the eggs with a sachet of thousand island dressing left over from the take-out salad, since they don't have any mayonnaise yet. There's enough chicken for one, layered on with lots of spreadable butter. Thinking ahead, he leaves the slices of tomato on the side.

He's barely had time to arrange the cut quarters on one of the plates from the abandoned unpacking, and set it on the pile of boxes nearest the bed, when Bucky comes out of the bathroom. There's a towel slung around his hips so loosely that it looks as if it went on purely so that Steve could pull it off again, which he promptly does. Bucky smells steamy clean and delicious, with little damp tendrils of hair around his temples and neck, and Steve feels like he stepped into a sinkhole of pure, greedy lust. Before he can even glance at the sandwich platter, Steve's got him gently but firmly pinned to the wall.

"Something I can do for you?" Bucky asks, sending all Steve's instincts haywire with one insolent tilt of his head.

"Can I fuck you?" Steve breathes, ready to beg. "I've gotta get inside you." 

"Well." Bucky wriggles his arm free to thumb at Steve's lip the way he'd test an avocado that might or might not be ripe. "I didn't spend half an hour getting all pretty for you so you could just look. But on the other hand, it's a shame to spoil the mood by sticking it in me with no--" 

Steve grabs his arm then his hip and flips him without waiting for the end of that sentence. He catches himself nimbly, palms against the wall, as if he'd been anticipating that exact move. 

"Oh, Buck," he murmurs, leaning into the soft hollow under Bucky's ear. "I've got that covered."

A second later, he's down on his knees, running the flat of his hands up the back of Bucky's thighs and over the muscled curve of his ass, hungry for him, but hungriest of all for the fact that he's asking for this, and spent time getting himself clean so that Steve can go to town on him. The first stroke of Steve's tongue over his asshole is so intense he clenches up everything from the waist down, and Steve loves that too, loves that he can part Bucky's cheeks with his hands and slowly lick him loose again. He loves the ripple of helpless reactions: even when his tongue is still, there's the prickle of his whiskers over all those rarely used nerve endings. 

And Bucky takes it so sweetly, that Steve has to fight off a pang of regret for all those years when he didn't have someone to treat him this nice every day of the week. He channels all that into touch as best he can, thumbing Bucky open and moving back in with his tongue, flickering over the sensitive skin around his rim and sliding in deep as he can go.

"Oh Christ – stop!" 

When Bucky turns around, he looks wrecked, his pupils big dark pools of overwhelmed sensation with a rim of crystalline grey. His hand trembles against Steve's face. 

"That is," he bites out every word, "gonna be the end of me. If you don't –"

He tips his head back against the wall and groans, and Steve wants him so bad the words jam in his mouth, all of them totally inadequate to express the right combination of heartfelt reverence and sheer animal hunger.

"You're beautiful like this," he manages, sounding hoarse. "I never want to look at anything else."

Bucky snorts fondly, even if he still sounds like every breath is killing him. "Jesus, you never quit." His face shifts as he reaches down to brush Steve's hair back from his forehead. "I couldn't shake you loose if I tried." 

His eyes turn fathomless for a moment, like memory has taken him someplace bleak, so Steve grabs his wrist tight and says, "Damn right you couldn’t. And don't you go trying."

Bucky lets a smile tug at his lax mouth. "'kay. You wanna come up here and give me one more reason not to?"

It's two steps from the wall to the bed, and that's how far they get before he's got Bucky bent over, passing him the lube so Steve can finger him properly open. He sighs as Steve sinks into the greedy, clutching heat of him, right up to that perfect moment when he's fully sheathed in Bucky's body. There's that pause that's so good Steve can barely stand it, letting them both register how deep Bucky's let him in, then he squirms for more and Steve gives it to him, building the pace slowly while Bucky gets a hand on himself and starts to jerk off. He closes his eyes and thinks of all that tight, defensive muscle under his tongue, that's letting him in now, parting for his dick, and that's it, he's losing it, shuddering as he comes, replacing his dick with his fingers and curling down hard until Bucky's shuddering too, and crying out, and collapsing face-forwards onto the bed. 

Steve crawls onto the mattress beside him and flops down. He feels so good he can taste immortality, hazy with endorphins and so fired up with love he could combust. But when he touches Bucky's shoulder, all he gets is a weary groan. Bucky pushes the hair out of his eyes and squints at him, turning thoughtful.

He stretches long and hard like a cat, right to the tips of his fingers, then arranges himself with one arm folded behind his head so that the whole of his beautiful body is laid out like a feast. 

"Box B2," he slurs, that smile softly tugging at the corner of his mouth, and drifts off. 

**

That night Bucky has a nightmare, one of the bad ones where he half-wakes and doesn't know where he is. Steve uses the only trick he's ever found for this, which is his voice. He murmurs meaningless reassurances until Bucky wilts back into the mattress, tucks his forehead against Steve's shoulder, and sleeps. In the morning, he doesn't remember it. 

The night after that, they go out dancing. Or, to put it more accurately, Bucky dances while Steve leans on the bar and watches him lose himself in the rhythm and the lights and the flexing bodies. 

They don't have another conversation about the bread maker but somehow it turns up on delivery, with a note from Becca saying _Lil suggests chocolate banana_. Meanwhile, Bucky comes home with champagne flutes one day, and a roasting tray the next, slowly filling up the gaps in their kitchen. Steve calls Winifred to let them know they're settling in okay, and he deliberately waits until he's out on a grocery run so he can frankly tell her how much good the move has done for Bucky. 

Steve lands a third client on referral, and when he reads the words _Be careful, she's had some bad experiences,_ something comes alive in him that had fallen dormant through the last three difficult months. Something his other two clients – wealthy professionals pursuing kink as a passionate hobby – hadn't awoken. He emails her straight away and, since Bucky isn't around to tell him off for it, books her in for three hours for the price of one, so they can take it nice and slow. 

Bucky's job interview with Bruce's contact goes … well.

**

He comes back from the interview tugging off his tie like it was strangling him, crackling with irritation but, under it all, Steve thinks, maybe a little pleased.

"If they tripled my pay, it still wouldn't be enough to make it worth this shit."

Steve, who'd tied it on a grouchy and palpably nervous Bucky that morning and found the new ritual so sexy he'd nearly made him late, quashes his disappointment.

"They're offering more, though. Right?"

"A bit," Bucky admits in a tone that clearly means more than a bit. "It's all right for data entry and a bit of debt collection." He grimaces and throws the tie over the sofa arm. "Corporate clients this time. Means I'd be guaranteed to deal with assholes every day of the week."

"You'll be great," Steve tells him sincerely, since _assholes_ is usually code for _people who intimidate me._ "I know you. You're the kind of guy people rely on. You pick up stuff I didn't even know was there." 

Bucky gives him a fond look that says that's not a very high bar. 

"Yeah, maybe so. But you're _smart_ smart. You're always a step ahead. You're gonna make it."

The look Bucky turns on him then is intensely considering. 

"Well," he says as he kneels on the sofa beside where Steve is sitting. "Maybe I'll end up like one of Natasha's high-fliers." 

There's a cognitive delay before the insinuation hits Steve everywhere at once. Then there's nothing in his head except the image of Bucky coming home from a high-powered meeting, aching to have all that responsibility taken off his shoulders with rope or cuffs or the flat of Steve's hand. 

"Yeah," Bucky grins. "That's exactly what I mean." 

He shrugs off his jacket and works on the buttons of his shirt.

Steve's heart is in his mouth, all of a sudden. "You want to start now?"

"Yeah I wanna start now. Gotta train you up right for when I need you."

He deftly tweaks the buttons at his cuffs and pulls his shirt over his head, then crawls over to get his knees on either side of Steve's thighs, and all of a sudden Steve's got a lap full of temptation. 

"What do you want?" Steve murmurs, hands going automatically to Bucky's waist then, encouraged, running his palms up Bucky's sides to make him shiver, cupping his pecs and giving his nipples a rough squeeze. He adjusts his seat as his dick starts to respond. 

"Oh, I dunno. You like that shibari, don't you? Nice and slow." He leans down to nuzzle against Steve's ear, nipping gently as his voice drops low. "I could do with a bit of spice today. You remember which box you put the cane in?" 

"Pretty sure I can find it."

"Well then. What are you waiting for?"

The cane is at the bottom of one of the bigger boxes, but he makes himself lay the contents out carefully on the floor of the bedroom, instead of turfing them out with the eagerness he feels. When he gets back, Bucky's still lounging on the sofa.

"You're not undressed yet."

"No one's asked me to take my clothes off."

There's that fractional tilt of his head that says _what are you gonna do about it?_ and Steve's not surprised anymore, now that he's got to know all those little mannerisms, that Bucky was setting off the dom in him from the start. He's a dream of a sub, when he's in the mood. But he'll always need that extra layer of alertness, and care, and Steve is reminded again of that powerful surge he'd felt the very first time he had Bucky under his hands, the yearning for someone to make him work for it.

He taps the cane lightly against his opposite palm. "I'm not asking. And I don't want to have to tell you twice."

Bucky rises to his feet with deliberate grace and bends at the waist to get his shoes and socks off, giving Steve a delightful view of how good his legs look in those tailored trousers before he takes those off, too, and folds them onto the arm of the sofa. 

Steve drops a folded blanket onto the floor. "Kneel on that. Hands on the floor."

Hesitating, Bucky's expression turns grimly resolute. They've only done this once before, and knowing what he knows now, that wasn't exactly for the healthiest reasons on Bucky's side.

"Hey." He switches the cane out of his right hand so he can squeeze Bucky's shoulder. "You say stop and we stop. But if you're not calling yellow, you need to get down there and show me how pretty you look on your knees."

He holds Bucky's gaze, watching for regret, but instead he gets a sequence of expressions from eye-rolling reproach to provocation to outright defiance. 

"Whatever you say," Bucky smirks, and gets down on one knee, then the other, then bends until his palms are flat on the carpet.

The response sizzles up like an earth tremor from the floor right up into his gut. His eyes soak up all that exquisite naked skin, the powerful muscle underneath, built with determination in adversity and only very slightly softened with the comfort of the last two years. The ripple of muscle under his shoulder blades and down his thighs every time he shifts is like a divine work of sculpture. And up his left arm runs the fall leaf ink work that decisively writes his own story over the top of the marks from his past. Steve's a dom for a reason. The sight of the man he loves bent over like this, completely bare and waiting for his pleasure, hits him in every cell of his body that can feel.

He takes a deep breath.

"Bucky, I don't care for the attitude you've brought home today. We're going to work some of that out of you." He rests the cane across Bucky's ass cheeks. "Your job is to keep still and speak up if it gets too much. Think you can do that?"

"Try me." 

Impatience now, on top of the challenge that was there already. Steve checks the excitement rising in himself one last time, to make sure he's in control of it and not the other way around. 

Then he raises the cane and brings it down.

"Christ almighty," Bucky spits out, rocking forward. The play of muscles from his thighs to shoulders is lovely to watch, as he catches himself and, fighting obvious reluctance, resumes his original position.

"A bit more bite than you remembered? We warmed you up pretty thoroughly last time. How many d'you think it's gonna take to sort your attitude out?"

"I guess we'll find out," Bucky says through gritted teeth.

He absorbs the next two strokes with nothing more than a grunt, so Steve trails the cane lightly up one cheek and then the other, teasing the skin until he can see the tight curve of muscle start to relax. Then he brings it down again with a whistle, striking across both cheeks this time.

Bucky lets out an explosive breath and his right hand comes off the ground, like he was going to block the next stroke, then slowly descends again. And that's the reason why Steve left the shibari until later. There's a kind of pleasure in tormenting Bucky when he's immobilised, but nothing works him up harder than the willpower it takes for Bucky to hold himself still and let this happen, the double ceding of autonomy. 

"So good for me, Buck." The tension in Bucky's spine loosens just a little. "I've never had anyone else like you. Never want to."

Bucky's shoulders and arms straighten, banishing the last trace of flinching. His back arches. His chin rises. His knees even edge a little further apart on the towel. But it's Steve whose throat makes a small, needy noise. 

"Buck," he grates out, an edge of pleading for he doesn't even know what, and brings the cane down again, leaving a white stripe across the nearest cheek where the impact fell hardest, that quickly flushes pink. 

This time, Bucky sighs. 

When he lays down a few brisk strokes over the other cheek, one on top of the other, he keeps up the stream of soft praise, meaning every ardent word of it. Before long, the flinching has stopped and Bucky's even leaning back into it, wanting more, and – God – the things it does to Steve's heart to remember how much trust it takes for Bucky to let himself be vulnerable this way, to quiet his defensive instincts enough to take pleasure in it. The struggle, though, seems to be less every time, and today Bucky brought it up so casually it speaks of a whole new level of comfort. It's as if, moving here, he left more than just his address behind. Or, knowing Bucky, made a decision to do exactly that.

There's pink patches in the middle of both cheeks, grading down to a mild blush at the top of his thighs, by the time Steve pauses. Bucky's panting fills the room. He raises his drooping head. 

Steve steps around to place the tip of the cane against the tender skin behind Bucky's balls and drag it slowly up between his cheeks in a wholly new kind of sensation. He shudders at that, arms and thighs quaking for the first time. 

"You getting hard for me, Bucky?"

"Fuck," Bucky spits out, and sniffs. "How the fuck would I know? Hard to feel any fucking thing when my ass is on fire." 

He's everything Steve wants, out of his head and answering from the gut, all the wary tension and the irritation forgotten. 

Steve gets down on his knees to get Bucky's cock in his hand. Its hot length starts to stiffen for him instantly, and Bucky groans, body swaying in Steve's direction. 

Steve takes mercy on him then and grasps him firmly by the back of the neck to lay down the last volley of strokes. Bucky bends into his grip, relieved at last of the responsibility of submitting. He falls down on his elbows, as one thwack after another pinks his flesh. If he keeps his physical responses under control, it's all coming out in noise now, regular hisses and _ahs_ of pleasure that grow in intensity until they take the shape of raw, unfiltered entreaty.

"You want to come, Buck?"

"Please, baby. Please."

"Get me wet then."

He drops the cane and holds his hand where Bucky can spit in it, and lick the spit into his palm, and spit again. Then he looks so perfect, as defenceless as a man can get, that Steve doesn't have it in him to play any more games. Nearly as hungry for Bucky's pleasure as Bucky is, he puts his hand to work in the firm grip the Bucky likes best, building the pace until his glutes and thighs are clenching in towards each stroke. Then Steve jacks him hard and furious until, with one ragged, choked-off cry, he gives it up. 

He manages to haul himself back onto the sofa while Bucky basks in the last aftershocks of pleasure and slowly starts to pull himself together. Giving his own erection a placatory nudge, he tries to breathe it out. 

A few minutes pass before Bucky draws himself up on his knees and reaches behind himself to gently feel the damage. 

"Fuck," he sighs, and rolls onto his hands to crawl over to Steve's feet. He lays his forehead on Steve's thigh for a moment and lets Steve's hands comb through his hair. 

"Still the most beautiful sight I've ever seen," Steve says, as he lifts his head and nimbly climbs up Steve's body to straddle his legs.

Though his moves are gentle, he's thrumming with energy, and utterly undaunted by the whole experience.

"Not too hard?"

"Too hard?" Bucky hooks his thumb under Steve's chin and tilts it so that he can lean down to open his mouth over Steve's Adam's apple and bite gently. "Jesus, Rogers. You are soft as butter. You think I don't know that better than anyone?"

His idle nips up Steve's windpipe reach his mouth and turn purposeful, while his fingers burrow down to lower the zip of Steve's jeans and slip inside, working up an immediate response. When they come up from their kiss, Steve's got to admit, his insides feel pretty buttery. 

"Only for you, Buck."

"Damn well better be," Bucky says darkly, as if it's something he has to keep an eye on, as if it wasn't the single surest thing in Steve's life. Steve's pretty sure he knows, though. "Damn well better be."

**

It takes them two and a half weeks to finish unpacking. But it feels like home long before that. 

The first morning they wake up together in the newly furnished bedroom, Bucky rolls out of Steve's arms to draw up the sash of one of the two big windows that look over the street. He stands there a while, watching, early sunlight reflecting in his eyes while the busy city noises filter in. 

"Yeah, all right," he says eventually. "We can make this work."

**

The end (definitely this time)


End file.
